
















ilii 










Qass. 
Book 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT 



THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 



14000 



Copyright, 1898, 
Bv THE MACWILLAN COMPANY. 



189£.. 




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Ka^ '^ t' Tts ctiroi ^irarpos V oSe iroWdv d|ji€tv«v.' 



PREFACE 

After twenty years devoted to the study 
and teaching of remoter and richer literatures, 
the demand for ''University Extension" lectures 
first suggested a return to these earliest guides 
of our New England boyhood. Like that boy- 
hood itself, these benignant figures have already 
something of the perspective which Time alone 
can bestow. Two of the six I never even saw. 
The men who, like Colonel Higginson and 
Professor Norton, have been our indulgent 
Mentors, were in their turn the younger asso- 
ciates of the group here discussed. 

Nevertheless our Yankee loyalty throbs too 
warmly from heart to heart to permit mere cold 
analytical criticism. But must impartial or 
fruitful criticism be cold, remote, even semi-hos- 
tile ? Can we not know aright, and fairly judge, 
those whom we love best, and to whom we owe 
most ? 



viii PREFACE 

Katahdin is not Olympus. The Charles and 
the Merrimac know not the impetuous spring 
current of the Arno. Lowell's noblest ode has 
no Pindaric splendor. Longfellow's epics of 
dying civilizations cannot set Gabriel and Hia- 
watha beside Odysseus or ^neas. This, at 
least, we realize as clearly as Brunetiere or 
Saintsbury could expound it. 

But if literary criticism has a right to share 
in warm and kindly life at all, it may well obey 
the spirit of the Delphic command, and begin 
nearest home. These are our poets, the inter- 
preters of our own life. We have loved them 
as long as we have shivered in the northeast 
wind, or welcomed the pale blossoms of March. 
The attempt to indicate the modest amount 
which they have contributed to the world's 
abiding wealth, may be defended as natural, 
loyal, and filial. 



W. C. L 



Adelphi College, Brooklyn, 
Easter, 1898. 



PARALLEL 



EMERSON 


HAWTHORNE 


LONGFELLOW 


1803, May 25. Born in 


1804, ytily 4. Born in 




Boston. 


Salem. 


1807, Feb. 27. Born in 
Portland. 


1817-21. Student at 






Harvard. 




1820. " Battle of Lov- 
ell's Pond." (First 
poem printed.) 


1821-26. Taught school 


1821-25. Student at 


1821-25. Student at 


and studied theology. 


Bowdoin. 


Bowdoin College. 
" Burial of Minni- 


1823. " Good-by, proud 




sink," etc. 


world." 






1829-32. Preacher in 


1826. Fanshawe 


1826-29. Studying in 


■Second Church, Bos- 




France, Spain, Italy, 


ton. 




and Germany. 


1829. First marriage. 




1829. Professor and Li- 
brarian, Bowdoin. 




1831-35. Tales, pub- 


1 83 1. First marriage. 




Hshed in "Token and 


Origin and Progress 


1832. Death of Mrs. 


Atlantic Souvenir." 


of French Language. 


Emerson. 




N.A.R. 


1833-34. Travelled in 




1832. Defence of Po- 


Europe. Met Car- 




etry. N.A.R. 


lyle. 




History of Italian 


1835. Emerson's second 




Language. N.A.R.' 


marriage. Settled in 




1833. Spanish Lan- 


Concord. 




guage and Literature. 


Lectured ift Boston, 




N.A.R. 


on English literature. 




1835. Outre-Mer. 
1835-36. Travelling in 


1836. Hymn at Con- 




E Jig I and, Germany, 


cord Bridge. 




and ScaftdiJiavia. 


- Nature. 




Death of Mrs. L. 


1837. Oration on the 


1837. Twice-told 


1836, Dec. Professor at 


American Scholar. 


Tales (Vol. I). 


Harvard. 


1838. Divinity School 




1838. Anglo-Saxon Lit- 


Address. 




erature. N.A.R. 




1839-41. If I Boston 


Psalm of Life. 


1840. "The Problem," 


custom house. 


1839. Hyperion. 


in first number of 




Voices of the 


Dial. 




Night. 
1840. Skeleton in Armor. 



LIVES 



XI 



WHITTIER 


HOLMES 


LOWELL 


AMERICANA 








1805-11. Wm. 








Emerson edited 








Monthly Aiithol- 


1807, Dec. 17. 






ogy. 


Bom in Haver- 


1809, Aug. 29. 




1807. Joel Bar- 


hill. 


Bor7t in Cam- 




low's Colum- 




bridge. 




biad. 








1812. Bryant's 








Thanatopsis 








written. (Pub- 








lished, 18 17.) 








1815. Foundation 








of the North 








American Re- 






1819, Feb. 22. 


view. 






Born in Cam- 


1819. Irving's 






bridge. 


Sketch Book. 


1822. Received 






1821. Cooper's 


Burns' poems as 






Spy. 


a present. 


1824-25. Student 




Bryant's first 


1826. First pub- 


at Andover. 




volume of 


lished verses in 


1825-29. Strident 




Poems. 


Garrison's pa- 


at Harvard. 




1823. Birth of Col. 


per. 






Higginson and 


1827-28. Taught 


1830. Old Iron- 




Francis Park- 


school. 


sides. 




man. 


1828. Student in 


Studied law 




1828. Webster's 


Haverhill Acad. 


a year. 




Dictionary, 


1831. Legends of 


1831-33. Studied 






New England. 


medicine at 
home. 




1832. Death of 
Freneau, (Born 
1752.) 


1833. In Phila- 


1833-36. Trav- 






delphia at the 


elled, and stud- 


1834-38. Student 


1833. The Knick- 


formation of 


ied medicine, 


at Harvard. 


erbocker. (Until 


the Antislavery 


chiefly in Paris. 




1858.) 


Society. 








1835-36, Member 








of Mass. Legis- 








lature. 










1836. Poems 




1836. First meet- 




(first collec- 




ing of the Trans- 




tion). 




cendental Club. 




1839-40. Prof. 


1838-40. Studied 






of Anatomy and 


law at Har- 






P hy s iol gy, 


vard. 


1837. Birth of 




Dartmouth Col- 




Howells. 


1840. Made his 


lege. Returned 




1840. Brook Farm 


home in Ames- 


to Boston. 


1840. A Year's 


Community or- 


bury. 


1840. Married. 


Life. 


ganized. 



PARALLEL 



EMERSON 


HAWTHORNE 


LONGFELLOW 


1841. Essays (Vol. i). 
1842-44. Edited Dial. 

1842. Death of his 
son Waldo, aged five. 
(Threnody.) 

1844. Address on 
Emancipation. 
Essays (Vol. 2). 

1846. Poems. 

1847-49. Lectured iii 
England on REP- 
RESENTATIVE Men. 
(Published, 1850.) 


1841. Grandfather's 
Chair. 

1841-42. At Brook 
Farj?i. 

1842. Married. 
1842-46. At Concord, 

in Old Manse. 

1845. Twice-told 
Tales (Vol. II). 

1846. Mosses. 
1846-50. In Salem 

custom house. 
1850. Scarlet Let- 
ter. 


1 841. Excelsior. 
Ballads and 

Poems. 

1842. An invalid in 
Germany, meets Frei- 
ligrath. 

Poems on Slav- 
ery. 

1843. Spanish Stu- 
dent. 

Second marriage. 
1847. Evangeline. 

(Begun 1845.) 
1849. Kavanagh. 


1856. English 
Traits. 

1857. " Brahma," in 
first number of Atlan- 
tic Monthly. 

1859. Speech at the 

Burns' festival. 
i860. Conduct of 

Life. 


1851. House of 
Seven Gables. 

Wonderbook. 

1852. Snow Image. 
Blithedale 

Romance. 
Life of Pierce. 
1852-53. In Concord, 

at ilie Wayside. 
1853-57. At Liverpool. 
1857-59. Travelling, 

chiefly in Italy. 
1859-60. bi Eiigland. 
i860. Marble Faun. 


1851. Golden Leg- 
end. (Begun 1850.) 

1855. Hiawatha. 

(Begun 1854.) 
1858. Miles Stand- 

ISH. (Begun 1857.) 


1866. Terminus. 


ti864, May. At Ply- 
mouth, N.H. 


1861. Death of Mrs. L. 

1863. Tales of a 
Wayside Inn. Part 
I. (Begun i860.) 


1867. May-day. 




1868. New England 

Tragedies. 
1868-69. Last visit in 

Europe. 
1867-70. Dante. 


1872. His hotise burned, 
and restored by friends. 




1872. Christus. 
1874. Morituri Saluta- 
mus. 
Aftermath. 

1878. Keramos. 

1879. Cross of Snow. 

1880. Ultima Thule. 


ti882, April. At Con- 
cord. 




ti882, Mar. In Craigie 
House. 













LIVES 



WHITTIER 


HpLMES 


LOWELL 


AMERICANA 






1844. " Conver- 


1840-44. The 






sations on Old 


Dial. 






Poets." 


1840-47. Brook 






Married. 


Farm Experi- 






1846-50. Writer 


ment. 


1847-57. Corre- 


1847. Elected 


for Antislavery 


1845. Poe's Ra- 


sponding editor 


Professor in 


Sta?idard. 


ven. 


" NatioJial 


Harvard Medi- 


1847-48. Big- 


1849. Death of 


Era:' 


cal School. 


low Papers 


Poe. (Born 


1849. " Margaret 




(First Series). 


1809.) 


Smith's Tour- 




1848. Fable FOR 




nal." 




Critics. 


1850. Death of 


1850. Songs of 




Vision of 


Margaret Fuller. 


Labor. 




Sir Launfal. 


(Born 1810.) 




1851. First class 


1851-52. In Eu- 


1851. Death of 




poem. 


rope. 


Cooper. (Born 




1852. Began Ly- 


1853. Mrs.L.died 


1789.) 




ceum lectures. 


at Elmwood. 


1851-52. Uncle 




on British poets. 


(Longfellow's 

"TwoAngels.") 

1855. Professor 


Tom's Cabin. 


1857. Collected 


1857. Autocrat, 


at Harvard. 


1857. Foundation 


Poems. 


in first volume 


1856-57. Study- 


of the Atlan- 


Made member 


of the Atlantic 


ing in Germ ajiy. 


tic Monthly. 


of the Atlantic 


(published 


1857. Second 




Circle. 


1859). 


marriage. 


1859. Irving died. 




i860. Profes- 


Editor of At- 


(Born 1783.) 




sor. 


lantic Mo7ithly. 






1861. Elsie Ven- 


1861-66. B I G- 


1862. Death of 




NER. 


Low Papers 


Thoreau. (Born 


1865. S N W- 


1868. Guardian 


(Second Se- 


1817.) 


BOUND. 


Angel. 


ries) . 


1863. Lincoln's 


1867. Tent on 


1870. Poet at 


1865, July 21. 


Gettysburg 


THE Beach. 


Breakfast 


Commemora- 


speech. 




Table. 


tion Ode. 
1869. Cathe- 
dral. 








1872-74. Abroad. 








1875-76. Three 


1878. Death of 






Memorial 


Bryant. (Born 




1879. Life of 


Odes. 


1794- ) 




Motley. 


1877-80. Mi?tis- 


1880. Concord 




1" h e Iron 


ter to Spain. 


School of Phil- 




Gate. 




osophyfounded. 


1890. Qiiadrimil- 


1884. Life of 


1880-85. ^^Finis- 


1881. J. T. Fields 


lennial of Hav- 


Emerson. 


ter to England. 


died. (Born 


erhill. Poem by 


1887. 100 Days 




18 17.) 


Whittier. 


in Europe. 






ti892, Sept. At 


ti894, Oct. In 


tiSgi, Aug. At 


1892. Death of 


Hampton Falls, 


Bostoti. 


Elmzvood,Cam- 
bridge. 


G. W. Curtis. 


N.H. 




(Born 1824.) 



CONTENTS 



I 



PAGE 



Introduction (pp. 1-20). 

English Literature in New England , . . i 
The Group and the Background ... 10 

II 
Emerson (pp. 21-47). 

The Philosophic Poet 21 

III 

Hawthorne (pp. 48-104). 

A Lonely Life 48 

The Earlier Sketches 67 

The Great Romances 82 

Other Works 93 

The Artist's Compensations .... 96 

IV 

Longfellow (pp. 105-154). 

The Youth of a Poet 105 

Longfellow's Maturity 130 



xvi CONTENTS 

V 

PAGE 

Whittier (pp. 155-194). 

The Quaker Laureate of Puritanism . . . 155 

VI 

Lowell (pp. 195-231). 

Poet and Patriot 195 

The Outward Life 204 

The Heart of the Singer 217 

VII 

Holmes (pp. 232-254). 

The Last Leaf 232 

VIII 

Retrospect and Prospect (pp. 255-263). 



THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 



INTRODUCTION 

English Literature in New England 

Literature is an artistic product, as truly as 
sculpture or architecture. All the fine arts have 
for their aim perfection of form, the creation 
of beauty: but, to a Puritan at least, nothing 
seems permanently beautiful which fails to sug- 
gest heroic human endeavor. Artists must, 
indeed, take their m^aterial, and in some degree 
their suggestions, from their individual and local 
environment. Yet, of all creative work, the 
expression of thought in language is least lim- 
ited by space or time. The Erechtheum is a 
ruin, and can never leave its desolated Acrop- 
olis ; the Vatican torso has outlived its proper 
setting; it stands lost and dethroned in a gal- 
lery of antiques ; but Homer remains crowned 



2 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

and serene, as clear-voiced as ever, in far higher 
honor, indeed, than the singer in his lifetime 
can ever have dreamed of being. Still, all the 
creations of genius are imperishably beautiful. 
Perhaps their greatest helpfulness to men lies 
precisely herein, that they lift us, in imagina- 
tion, quite out of all the cramping limitations 
besetting our daily routine : out of mere reality 
into the ideal world. 

Possibly no group of creative writers ever 
fitted more naturally and easily into their set- 
ting, than the authors of Concord, Cambridge, 
and Boston. Yet, while Emerson and his friends 
will always be known as the New England 
poets, their origin, their life, their influence, is 
neither chiefly sectional, nor even merely na- 
tional. New England did not create them, did 
not own them, cannot contain them. As truly 
as that earlier singer, whose time is disputed, 
whose name is denied, and to whose wide- 
wandering ghost an earthly abiding-place will 
doubtless never be granted, so these whom 
we fondly call our own, are in truth mankind's 
KTr\yia €? aei — a treasure forevermore. 

Nor do we turn to them chiefly, or most 



INTRODUCTION 3 

confidently, for a better knowledge of New Eng- 
land life. Sir Launfal is at least as precious 
to many of us as 'Zekiel, or as Hosea himself; 
Donatello and Miriam outshine the paler pair 
of our own folk standing beside them. Whit- 
tier himself has sung Stonewall Jackson's march 
through Frederick, and even the relief of far- 
off Lucknow, more thrillingly — perhaps more 
truly — than Floyd Ireson's ride! 

It has sometimes been proposed, as a grace- 
ful tribute to our most popular authors, that 
their statues should be set up in public parks, 
surrounded by the ideal beings who are the 
creatures of their genius. In Longfellow's case 
this would surely include Hiawatha and his 
Minnehaha, Evangeline and Gabriel, perhaps 
also that kingly pair, Robert of Sicily and Olaf 
the Dane ; certainly we could not spare dear 
Elsie, who offers her young life so gladly for 
her prince, in the Legenda Aurea. Yet these 
favorites are almost wholly folk who never 
could have breathed our air, or understood a 
word of our speech. 

What is so evidently true of this poet, still 
the dearest to the national heart, is quite as 



4 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

true of the masters in fiction everywhere. 
Creative authors never merely sketch such an 
individual man or woman as they, and we, 
have known. Every true stroke delineates 
more the universal than the particular. Is 
Andromache a Grecian, like her minstrel, a 
Trojan, like her husband, or the Cilician 
daughter of Eetion ? No one ever cared to 
ask. She is the type of sorrowing wife- 
hood in the bitter hours of war and bereave- 
ment. As in Homer's day, so in ours. Romola, 
Miriam, and even Lorna are neither living 
individuals nor racial types. They are merely 
typical woman-souls. Each is an ideal of 
nineteenth-century womanhood, but we are 
made to see, too, how in her, as in us, all the 
past experience of humanity is crystallized into 
expression, all serener future possibilities are 
foreshadowed. 

The same test may be safely applied even to 
the prince of artists. Ophelia has no Danish 
feature, Juliet is Italian only in her absolute 
impulsive naturalness : it never occurred to us 
that Rosalind is a French demoiselle ! Neither 
has the great magician metamorphosed them 



INTRODUCTION 5 

all into English girls, and assigned them to the 
Elizabethan age — or to any other generation. 
They abide in a fairer land than merry Eng- 
land or sunny France, in statelier homes than 
Veronese palace or royal castle of Denmark : 
for they dwell lovingly together in the noble 
realm of art and ideal beauty. That which is 
most precious, and most lasting, in a poem, a 
tale, or even an essay, is least distinctively Eng- 
lish, or American, or French. It is " Euripides 
the Human," Montaigne the human. Burns the 
human, whose influence lives and works long- 
lasting as the world. 

The " Scarlet Letter" has a vivid local setting, 
— and so has the "Heart of Mid-Lothian." 
Neither is a masterpiece merely, or chiefly, 
because it is a more or less accurate study of 
Puritanism in New England, or of Scottish life. 
Hawthorne's genius, and perhaps Scott's also, is 
revealed, rather, in the treatment of that most 
universal of problems, the vain attempt to escape 
from the inherent penalty of sin. As Rembrandt 
throws the high light on human faces, so does 
every great artist, whatever the material in 
which he works. Tito is man tempted and 



6 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

fallen ; Savonarola, like Romola, is man rising 
heroic from temptation and from the bewilder- 
ment of self-delusion. Indeed, Savonarola's 
right to appear in the book must be vindicated, 
if at all, by the part he plays in the central 
plot of the romance. Whether the real re- 
former of Florence was just such a man, 
whether the background is archaeologically 
accurate : these are alike minor details, hardly 
touching aesthetic criticism at all. 

The recent death of our most influential 
writer reminds us of the question once so 
fiercely debated, whether '* Uncle Tom's Cabin " 
was a truthful picture of slavery days in Ken- 
tucky and Louisiana. If it could be proved 
that no black family was ever separated, no 
innocent negro ever flogged, since Jamestown 
was founded, the swarthy hero of a baseless 
romance would remain as deathless as Homer's 
impossible son of the sea-nymph, with his 
magic armor and his talking horse ! Both are 
truly drawn, since they act in response to the 
most universal human motives. No other test 
of artistic quality is essential. 

Yet we must once more reverse the shield of 



INTRODUCTION 7 

truth. While the artist's thought is thus free 
and eternal, the form in which he clothes it is 
largely shaped for him by usage and tradition, 
even before he himself is born. Phidias, the 
pupil of his Hellenic masters, working under 
the Attic sky, was not merely forced to use his 
native Pentelic marble, instead of New Hamp- 
shire granite — or " staff " : it was equally im- 
possible, or inconceivable, for him, upon the 
Acropolis, to rear a Florentine dome or a 
Gothic spire. 

Even so, we who speak and write the Eng- 
lish tongue cannot escape — the wise do not 
even struggle against — the masterful influence 
of the myriad workers who through so many 
centuries have moulded and perfected Anglo- 
Saxon speech. We, and those who form our 
audience, have been from infancy the pupils of 
Chaucer (Professor Child would have bidden 
me say, of Caedmon) and of Tennyson, and of 
all the goodly array between. Whatever is 
traditional in all our arts, except perhaps music, 
is chiefly and primarily English in form, though 
it is largely Greek in spirit. Moreover, free as 
the writer is, he, especially, works in materials 



8 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

which have already been shaped for him : even, 
it may be, moulded over and over before him, 
by weak hands as well as strong. A really 
fresh rhyme brings us nowadays almost a 
shock of surprise. In this matter our mother- 
tongue, with its excessive variety of endings, 
gives us rather step-motherly fare. Our foun- 
tains can never seek their source anywhere 
save in the familiar mountains^ their shadows 
are not only compelled to traverse the meadows, 
but to endure the reproach of an imperfect 
echo even there ! We sometimes seem to 
ourselves almost like those late Romans who 
shaped their structures wholly out of blocks, 
ready carved, taken from the earlier buildings. 
The " Chicago Dial," especially, has long waged 
an effective warfare, of argument and ridicule, 
against the notion, that American literature in 
general, and sectional Western literature in 
particular, should cut loose from the English 
traditions that make up the past, and grow 
from roots deep-struck in a virginal native soil. 
It is in fact only very incompletely, if at all, 
that literature in America can ever tear itself 
free from the parent stock in what Hawthorne 



INTRODUCTION 9 

was fond of calling " Our Old Home." It is 
precisely the vital English element in our lan- 
guage and literature, in our political and social 
instincts, in our entire civilization indeed, that 
has enabled us in any hopeful degree to assimi- 
late that chaotic mass of humanity which year 
by year has poured into the great gateway of 
Manhattan. The last thing a far-sighted patriot 
can desire is a weakening of any ties which 
still bind us to the happiest of our many father- 
lands, the island stronghold 

" Where Freedom broadens slowly down 
From precedent to precedent." 

May even the exigencies of politics never 
again require an outburst of half-sincere jeal- 
ousy, or unreasoning rage, against our next of 
kin, " such as of late o'er pale Britannia 
past!" But, at any rate, the sincere student 
of letters must see clearly that we (I speak 
now for the " old New Englanders ") are 
twice-transplanted Anglo-Saxon folk, who, in 
the forms of our speech, as chiefly in the 
forms of our life, have been moulded by the 
long, slow centuries of English growth. 



lo THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

And yet, so far as the instinct of the 
artist awakes in each man, the boundless uni- 
verse is his. The environment in which he 
sets his gem, or his cathedral, may be as 
homely and familiar as Maud MuUer's farm : 
it may be the vaguest spot in '' desolate, wind- 
swept space." One thing only is essential, 
the presence, or the suggestion, of human 
beings acting from motives not wholly ig- 
noble, as we ourselves might conceivably act, 
or wish that we had acted. Even Homer, or 
Sappho, or Sophocles, can teach us, directly, 
little more than what Sidney said, and Long- 
fellow only echoed : 

" Look, then, into thy heart, and write ! " 

The Group, and the Background 

In attempting, then, the sympathetic study 
of this group of literary artists, so largely 
homogeneous in spirit and aims, let us en- 
deavor to keep constantly in mind that they 
belong, as artists, to universal humanity, while 
they are, also, by inheritance and tradition, 
brother-pilgrims of the goodly company that 



INTRODUCTION II 

fills all the highways and lanes of English 
song, from the Tabard Inn of Southwark to 
the Red Horse in Sudbury. 

New England has held the leadership in 
our literature heretofore, partly, at least, be- 
cause it remained nearest in every way to the 
mother-land. If that leadership has now 
finally passed away, it is largely because the 
Keltic and Latin invasions have driven so 
much of the old stock farther west. The so- 
cial and scholarly traditions of a half-century 
ago are now preserved, perhaps, almost as 
much in Michigan or Ohio as in Massachu- 
setts and Connecticut. Instead of New Ha- 
ven and Cambridge, Ann Arbor and Oberlin 
may be regarded as the western bulwarks of 
a newer New England. 

All these six were loyal sons of the North- 
east. Not one of them would have spurned, 
or ignored for an instant, the rugged land in 
whose bosom all of them now lie at rest. In 
one or two, even the note of provinciality is 
at times plainly to be heard ; whether deliber- 
ately and aggressively struck as in Hosea 
Biglow, or unconsciously as in Whittier : New 



12 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

England loves them none the less because 
they speak in their native dialect ! 

A most pleasing feature is the bond of 
generous friendship knitting them all to- 
gether. When the great romancer died, the 
five poets were all among the band of a 
dozen personal friends who followed him to 
his grave at Concord, the white locks of his 
classmate, Longfellow, leading the little pro- 
cession. Of each and all the words of Long- 
fellow hold true : 

" He did not find his sleep less sweet 
For music in some neighboring street." 

Surely Longfellow's own sleep was the 
sweeter year after year, indeed, for the know- 
ledge that his younger friend's music in a 
neighboring street was of a strain at least 
as pure and lofty as his own. Of the mutual 
helpfulness and inspiration in such a circle, 
Dr. Holmes speaks loyally and wisely in the 
opening paper of the ''Autocrat." 

There was much besides kindred blood and 
common environment to draw them together. 
They were men sound and sane of nature, 



INTRODUCTION 13 

free from the fever of wild passion, but full of 
the steadfast Puritan warmth and earnestness 
of temper. 

They were happy and faithful in their domes- 
tic relations ; indeed, all save Whittier, who never 
married, owed constant relief, and much of their 
inspiration, to their devoted and congenial wives. 
All took a wise measure of their own powers, 
and did earnestly, but with due economy, the 
work for which they were best iitted. All met 
upon such common ground as patriotism, hatred 
of oppression and slavery, and liberal but fer- 
vent religious faith. 

The great difficulty a New England man of 
our generation finds in discussing these poets is, 
that all his own early associations and inter- 
ests are permeated and dominated by them. 
Many of our elementary emotions and every- 
day thoughts seem always to have expressed 
themselves in verses of Longfellow and phrases 
of Emerson. We cannot " hitch our wagon to 
a star," nor even "think of the beautiful town 
that is seated by the sea," without them ! To 
analyze them and compare them with other 
authors, is like criticising our parents' features, 



14 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

or expounding the charm of our native land- 
scape. 

The sturdy stock planted upon the north- 
eastern shores of our common country was long 
too busy with ruder tasks to cultivate the fair 
flower of imaginative literature. As Emerson 
says (in ''Social Aims"), ''The necessity of 
clearing the forest, laying out town and street, 
and building every house and barn and fence, 
then church and townhouse, exhausted such 
means as the Pilgrims brought, and made the 
whole population poor ; and the like necessity 
is still found in each new settlement in the Ter- 
ritories." The horrors of Indian wars, and later 
the struggle against English tyranny, absorbed 
much of their energies as well. 

Then a stern and joyless creed, teaching the 
utter vileness of lost man, and the retributive 
severity of the Divinity, must have repressed the 
happier flights of their imagination. Grim tales 
of witch and wizard, of phantom ships and evil 
spirits, they repeated and believed. Credulous 
old Cotton Mather, who is largely responsible 
for the witchcraft persecutions, has left behind 
him a stout volume filled with such marvels. 



INTRODUCTION 



15 



But only when handed down to a mellower age, 
and to men of gentler faith, did these become, 
for a Hawthorne and a Whittier, the plastic ma- 
terials of romance and poetry. These Magnalia 
of Cotton Mather, Bradford's and Winthrop's 
Journals, the Diary of Samuel Sewall, the ser- 
mons and the close-linked theological philosophy 
of Jonathan Edwards, with many other equally 
ponderous tomes, survive to record the courage, 
the piety, even the learning of our forefathers ; 
and to make clear that belles-lettres could never 
have found toleration in their stern, narrow, he- 
roic lives ! 

The purely literary masterpieces of contem- 
porary England were actually unknown for gen- 
erations. It is declared by a careful student 
that there is no trace, down to the year 1700, of 
any copy existing in New England of either 
Shakspeare or Milton : though this last state- 
ment is so surprising that Mr. Lowell's resolute 
incredulity ought perhaps to be mentioned, if 
only as an encouragement to other doubters. 

Indeed, it was not in New England that the 
first literary men of 'national and international 
fame appeared. As to Franklin, Philadelphia, 



1 6 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

his kindlier stepmother, will at least dispute 
the claims of Boston. In the patriotic and 
political eloquence of the revolutionary period 
Virginia had the largest share. Freneau, a few 
of whose early verses are like the first twitter- 
ing of half-awakened birds before the dawn, 
was born in New York. Irving and his friends 
had little connection with the East. Even 
Bryant we have not, upon the whole, felt justi- 
fied in including among New England poets, 
any more than Poe, though both happen to 
have been born in Massachusetts : Poe, in- 
deed, by a curious freak of fate, actually in 
Boston. 

But very early in the present century, at 
latest, Boston was evidently becoming the cen- 
tre of a deeper and more serious culture than 
our continent had known, — a culture which 
was preparing the congenial soil from which 
a creative literature could spring up. From 
this cultivation other rich fruits have grown. 
The historical field, in particular, counts Tick- 
nor, Prescott, Motley, Palfrey, Parkman, and 
others. Webster, Choate, Sumner, and Phillips 
are as many marked types of forensic elo- 



INTRODUCTION i 7 

quence. Channing and Parker were as mag- 
nificently diverse in pulpit oratory as in spirit 
and temper, while Hedge and Freeman Clarke 
were their worthy successors. Nor do any of 
these lists exhaust even the most illustrious 
names. Yet the popular voice undoubtedly 
sets forth these six, especially, as the New 
Englanders with whom every lover of pure 
literature must be well acquainted, — in the 
order of their birth, Emerson, Hawthorne, 
Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes, Lowell. 

It can hardly be necessary to apologize for 
including Hawthorne among the poets. For 
our present purpose poetry may be defined as 
imaginative literary creation in artistic form : 
and to this title, certainly, " The Gray Cham- 
pion " and "Scarlet Letter" have as unques- 
tioned a claim as the " Commemoration Ode " 
or " Hiawatha." We perhaps lack a term 
as wide as the German " Dichtung," to include 
poetical work unfettered by regular rhythm. 
Emerson assorts — too broadly, I think — that 
the Germans account Goldsmith a poet (Dichter), 
as the author of the ''Vicar of Wakefield," not 
^of the '' Deserted Village." 



1 8 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

To this definition of the literary art as the 
creation of a beautiful form, the objection may 
naturally be made that the ^natter is of supreme 
importance. Both the precept and the example 
of Emerson often seem to support the famous 
maxim of grim old Cato, who though not 
primarily a literary critic, has some earmarks 
of the tribe : 

" Rem tene, verba sequentur." 
(Get hold of the matter, the words will come of them- 
selves.) 

But there is no real disagreement here. The 
schoolmaster is quite right in his iteration, 
" Don't say you understand it but you can't 
express it! " Utterance is the only human test 
of comprehension. Clear thinking and clear 
expression, noble ideas and perfect grace in 
utterance, are mutually helpful, are indeed but 
as the obverse and reverse of the same medal. 
In Lincoln's speech at Gettysburg, in Emerson's 
hymn, written to be sung " By the rude bridge 
that arched the flood," in Hawthorne's *' Snow 
Image," who can ever consider the thought and 
expression separately } Emerson says : " I 



INTRODUCTION 19 

might even say that the rhyme is there in the 
theme, thought, and image themselves. Ask 
the fact for the form. The verse must be alive, 
and inseparable from its contents." 

Emerson's own poetic art, in particular, is 
indeed often incomplete. His clay seems to 
stiffen under his hand before he has finished 
the image. Or to change the figure, we are 
reminded of a beautiful quartz crystal only 
half-detached from the rough and opaque rock 
behind it. Lowell hits this (rather too hard) 
in the rollicking verses of the " Fable for 
Critics," e.g. : 

"In the worst of his poems are mines of rich matter, 
But thrown in a heap with a crush and a clatter." 

There is crudeness of form in Emerson's verse, 
but hardly much clattering and crushing ! 
These unfinished fragments from an artistic 
workshop have often a peculiar attractiveness, 
such as Hawthorne felt in a half-worked statue, 
still partly imprisoned, as he taught us to feel, 
within the block where it had so long waited 
only for the sculptor's releasing hand. But 
even here, it is the perfected crystal and not 



L 



20 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

the rock, the statue rather than the block of 
marble, that supplies — of course, with the aid 
of our imagination — every charm save that of 
contrast. And while a few such unfinished 
experiments have seen the light, far more were 
recast in a more suitable mould, or broken up 
altogether, and returned to the star-dust of Em- 
ersonian thought. 

Finally, Emerson would have been the last 
to claim or see any merit in crudeness or obscu- 
rity. Still less would he ever affect tortuous or 
vague expression for its own sake, as Browning, 
despite his ringing denial, often seems to do. 
Though the so-called transcendentalism of Em- 
erson has affected Lowell also at times, the 
mysticism is wholly in the ideal tendencies of 
their thought, and never darkens the expres- 
sion. Perhaps Emerson's calm, strong '' Apolo- 
gia pro vita s7La^' entitled " The Transcendent- 
alist," is as good an illustration as can be 
offered of both these features: mystical depth 
of thought and transparent clearness in expres- 
sion. But we are already past the turning of 
the leaf. 



II 

EMERSON 
Emerson the Poet 

By seniority of birth, by a self-poised inde- 
pendence in life and art, and by the loyal 
acknowledgment of his friends, Ralph Waldo 
Emerson is pointed out unmistakably as the 
leader in this school of literature. In particu- 
lar, his oration "The American Scholar," de- 
livered to the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa Society 
on August 31, 1837, was widely hailed as the 
" Declaration of Independence for American 
literature," and exerted a lasting influence upon 
that whole generation, for which it seemed to 
usher in a new era. 

With him, then, we naturally begin. As with 
the others, his biography is in itself uneventful. 
All the six, indeed, were born in modest but 
respectable surroundings. All were early influ- 
enced by the best New England culture. All, 



2 2 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

save Whittier, were educated at Harvard or 
Bowdoin College. All lived long tranquil lives, 
chiefly devoted to literature ; and, early or late, 
every one enjoyed, in his lifetime, the general 
love and admiration of his countrymen. 

Emerson sprang from seven generations of 
Puritan clergymen. This did not in his case 
indicate anything narrowing or cramping in 
the intellectual or spiritual influences which 
made up his environment. About half the 
earlier graduates of Harvard College became 
clergymen : the founders being more successful 
in this direction than in their other object, the 
pious education of the Indian youth ! (It is 
said that only one little Indian ever carried off 
his sheepskin from Harvard, — and that even 
he soon after relapsed to wigwam and blanket !) 
The Unitarian movement of 1 800-1 820 had 
been preparing for at least a half century, and 
indeed from the early eighteenth century on- 
ward there had been constant complaint and 
suspicion against the too liberal atmosphere of 
Harvard College. Emerson's father, pastor of 
the oldest Boston Congregational church till 
his premature death in 181 1, was liberal, not to 



EMERSON 23 

say radical, in his beliefs, introduced little the- 
ology into his sermons, and foreshadowed the 
gentle tolerance so notable in his son. 

From his birth (May 25, 1803) Ralph Waldo 
Emerson had every encouragement to simple 
living and lofty, free-ranging thought. The 
slender income of his widowed mother did not 
prevent the fullest education of her sons. 

Emerson does not express enthusiastic grati- 
tude for inspiration from his academic teachers : 
yet among his instructors at Harvard were Ed- 
ward Everett in Greek, and George Ticknor 
in modern languages. He listened also, in 
Boston, to the political eloquence of Webster 
and the sermons of William Ellery Channing, 
whose writings are still the best exposition 
of the more conservative Unitarianism, as 
contrasted with the aggressive radicalism of 
Theodore Parker. Perhaps the chief among 
Emerson's direct instructors, however, was 
another member of that brilliant and fertile 
stock, — Edward Tyrrel Channing, brother of 
the preacher. This great educator held the 
Boylston chair of rhetoric and oratory in Har- 
vard College for more than thirty years (18 19- 



24 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

185 1), and the claim is sometimes made for him 
(by old Harvard men, like E. E. Hale and T. W. 
Higginson) that his pupils include nearly all 
the Americans of that generation who ever 
learned how to write ! 

After a brief experience in teaching, and 
a course in divinity, Emerson, in 1829, was 
ordained as a Unitarian clergyman. This 
career he abandoned three years later, chiefly 
because he was unwilling to continue the cere- 
mony of the Communion, which he did not 
believe to have been intended by the Founder 
as a permanent Christian rite. His temperate 
farewell sermon on this subject is extant. The 
rest of his rather mild pulpit discourses he did 
not wish preserved. 

During a brief visit abroad, in 1833, his friend- 
ship with Carlyle began. It continued, with 
hardly a cloud, throughout their lives. To be 
sure, the broad Atlantic rolled between. It is 
too curious to imagine what might have occurred 
if only domineering Tam had accepted the 
invitation to come over and edit the " Dial." 

Upon Emerson's return, in 1834, he settled 
in Concord. There he was, for nearly half a 



EMERSON 25 

century, known and loved by all, and a useful 
citizen in town meeting and in all local affairs. 
This settlement in Concord is important in the 
general story of American literature. With the 
exception of Hawthorne, the writers and thinkers 
since associated with that quiet village, e.g. 
Thoreau, Alcott, Margaret Fuller, were drawn 
thither as disciples or friends of Emerson, and 
they form about him something more like a 
literary school than has elsewhere appeared. 

In this same year, 1834, Emerson entered 
the lecture field, and initiated the so-called 
Transcendental Movement. As he himself 
reminds us, only the name was (comparatively) 
new. It was the old appeal from the outward 
realities of life to the diviner intuitions of the 
human soul. In a striking passage he shows 
how in all ages this appeal has been repeated : 

*'This way of thinking, falling on Roman 
times, made Stoic philosophers : falling on 
despotic times, made patriot Catos and Bru- 
tuses : falling on superstitious times, made 
prophets and apostles : on popish times, made 
protestants and ascetic monks, preachers of 
Faith against the preachers of Works : on pre- 



2 6 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

latical times, made Puritans and Quakers ; and 
falling on Unitarian and commercial times, 
makes the peculiar shades of Idealism which 
we know." This sentence strangely omits the 
first and most famous of idealists, Plato, to 
whom much of Emerson's philosophy is a 
direct reversion. 

The Transcendentalist, or, as Emerson would 
have preferred to be called, the Idealist, in- 
sists above all that the material things we 
call realities are in continual flow and ebb, 
appearing and vanishing ; and are, also, 
wholly beyond man's control, or even his real 
knowledge : while heroism, truth, love, justice, 
and the other abstractions, stigmatized by the 
commercial spirit as intangible, are alone eter- 
nal, unchangeable, within the soul's reach, and 
precious to man. No one would realize better 
than Emerson that the theme is no new one ; 
but indeed it is the oldest and most unques- 
tionable truths that need most constant itera- 
tion. In pointing men's thoughts away from 
material things to the everlasting verities, he 
invokes to his aid every spiritual teacher from 
the hymns of the Vedas to Swedenborg. But 



EMERSON 27 

Emerson's own contribution is larger than his 
borrowings. In particular, he applies to this 
end, with that poetic largeness of vision which 
is the truest accuracy, the latest doctrines of 
science, e.g. the infinite permutations of matter 
in varying chemical forms, or the converti- 
bility and indestructibility of force. He even 
anticipates Evolution in various poetic utter- 
ances, e.g. : 

" And striving to be man, the worm 
Mounts thro' all the spires of form." 

Perhaps the most pervading element of allV 
Emerson's work is his optimism. The uni- 
verse, whether viewed outwardly or as a re- 
flection in man's soul, is in perfect harmony. 
Evil to him is only negative, — the absence of 
good, — and must everywhere lose ground and 
at last disappear. Against the acutest forms 
of present evil, for instance, slavery, Emerson 
lifts his voice fearlessly and in unmistakable ' 
tones. But he never doubts the complete and 
swift victory of every righteous cause. 

Against the mercantile spirit, the vulgar 
standards of success as tested by wealth and 



28 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

material prosperity, Emerson echoed the pro- 
tests uttered by the wiser minds of every age. 
Such a paper as his upon ** Politics" occasion- 
ally assumes a sharper tone of reproof, which is 
unhappily quite as much needed by us of the 
next generation as by his contemporaries. It 
was not, however, his chief mission to work 
effectively in company with other men for 
practical reforms. Even among the great 
antislavery leaders he remains somewhat apart, 
the critic, the philosopher, the observer, stand- 
ing for those highest ideals toward which 
present reforms only slowly tend. He did 
not enter at all into the famous Communistic 
experiment at Brook Farm, though he was 
during part of those very years Editor of the 
" Dial," which was largely the organ of the 
Roxbury community. Naturally this apparent 
aloofness brought some severe complaints from 
those who counted upon him for more direct 
and practical aid; but he never complained 
of being ''misunderstood." He calmly ful- 
filled his mission and trusted in God. 

This half century of mature life was spent 
almost wholly in New England, and his brief 



EMERSON 29 

absences — even a successful lecturing tour in 
England — had little effect upon his develop- 
ment. Indeed, in a sense he developed little 
after he passed the half-way house of life. 
His influence was a steadfast and consistent 
one, and steadily widened to something as like 
popularity as an ethical teacher and mystic 
philosopher could ever hope to attain. His 
life in Concord, meanwhile, we may describe 
as one of refined economy, or at least of aus- 
terest simplicity. The material accumulated 
for annual courses of lectures appeared with 
little change as successive volumes of essays, 
— of which we now count nine, including 
posthumous collections. 

Still more slowly grew his little volume of 
poems. These are never the impulsive record 
of a passing mood or incident. Herein they 
differ as widely as possible from the verses of 
his friend Holmes, which are nearly all " occa- 
sional." Each Emersonian poem is, rather, the \ 
deliberate, labored, final expression of a calm ' 
philosophic thought. It has not been my pur- 
pose to delineate, even in outline, Emerson the 1 
religious and social teacher, the philosopher, the ' 



30 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

scholar ; yet these phases are all needed to ex- 
plain Emerson the artist, the poet. We have 
so masterly a critic as Lowell upon our side in 
asserting that this is, after all, his chief function 
and essential character. When Emerson once 
expressed a doubt if he could ever write poetry, 
his friend, Frank Sanborn, said, " Some of us^ 
think you can write nothing else." Even in hisi 
wisest essays he is oftener lyrical than logical. 
He illuminates his thought by brilliant images 
and far-flashing divinations, instead of weaving 
an unbroken chain of argument. These traits 
are not, to be sure, equally prominent in all his 
work, though there is a striking evenness in his 
utterance, since he always moves serenely in the 
loftiest and purest realms of thought. 

Yet a certain homeliness of metaphor and 
illustration, as in the teachings of the Platonic 
Socrates with his "cobblers, and fullers, and 
midwives," constantly reminds us that Emerson 
is a shrewd practical Yankee farmer and good 
neighbor, as well as a Neoplatonic mystic and 
idealist. Here again we are naturally tempted 
to quote Lowell, but Whittier's '' Last Walk in 
Autumn" will serve as well : 



EMERSON 



31 



" He who might Plato's banquet grace, 
Have I not seen before me sit, 

And watched his Puritanic face 
With more than Eastern wisdom lit ? 

Shrewd mystic ! Who upon the back 
Of his Poor Richard's Almanack 

Writing the Sufi's song, the Gentoo's dream, 
Links Menu's age of thought with Fulton's age of steam !" 

This double nature the very face of Emerson 
reveals even to the most casual student of 
physiognomy. 

Some of Emerson's writings, naturally enough, 
have little or nothing of mysticism ; and in these 
his clear nervous style and masterly vocabulary 
give him great power over any reader. This 
is illustrated especially by his plain unvarnished 
account of San Domingo slavery, in the Eman- 
cipation Address. Of his entire volumes, 
" English Traits " is possibly the easiest read- 
ing, and is perhaps the most searching analy- 
sis of England's folk and life that has ever 
been made. Any one who will read Emerson's 
discussion of manners in the little paper on 
"Social Aims," will iind himself compelled to 
take the sermon to heart, and mend his own 
manners as he may. 



32 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

Emerson as he grew older fused the two 
diverse elements of his nature, his practical 
and ideal sides, more and more fully. There 
is a popular story, that a friend of President 
Lincoln once asked him the quizzical question, 
'* Mr. Lincoln, how long do you think a man's 
legs ought to be .? " The great Emancipator, 
who was rarely caught off his guard in a con- 
test of native wit, replied without hesitation 
that he had never given the subject careful 
thought, but it seemed to him — glancing at 
his own protracted and awkward extremities — 
that "they ought to be just about long enough 
to reach the ground." Emerson, without ever 
withdrawing his head from the loftiest ether, 
did plant his feet more firmly, with the years, 
upon his native earth. Certainly I for one con- 
fess that his earliest book, " Nature," and sorne 
other papers, "The Oversoul," "Circles," etc., 
are intelligible to me only in very moderate 
amounts, and only when the reader and his 
author are in fully sympathetic mood. But in, 
for example, the later volume, "Letters and 
Social Aims," or the paper entitled "Wealth," 
in the " Conduct of Life," much the same sub- 



EMERSON 



33 



jects are treated quite as loftily and rigorously; 
yet the more cogent linking of the reasoning, the 
richer illustration, perhaps the greater clearness 
and maturity of Emerson's own thought and 
style, carry us along as it were despite ourselves, 
and command full attention to the end. Many 
more young people would learn to love and 
crave Emerson if set to read the first paper in 
the volume just referred to, "Poetry and Imagi- 
nation," lofty and wide-reaching as it is, than 
if their introduction to the philosopher were 
through the thin volume entitled " Nature," 
which in his early youth won him " fit audience 
though few." A well-known poem, " The 
Apology," has the lines : 

" I go to the god of the wood 
To fetch his word to men." 

In this first prose work Emerson seems hardly 
yet to have relearned fully the speech, and 
recalled the interests, of his kind, after a longer 
and deeper forest-seclusion than was his later 
wont. 

Inadequate as is this bird's-eye view of 
the general life and work of Emerson, we must 



34 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

hasten on, to touch upon a few favorites among 
the poems, into which his purest thoughts are 
crystallized. Of this preeminence of poetry, 
Emerson himself often assures us. " Poetry is 
the consolation of mortal men. They live, 
'cabined, cribbed, confined,' in a narrow and 
trivial lot . . . A poet comes who lifts the veil ; 
gives them glimpses of the laws of the uni- 
verse ..." Indeed, in the closing strain of 
" Poetry and Imagination " he almost seems to 
echo Clough's thought in " Come, Poet, Come ! " 
viz., that the end and object of human life 
itself is to furnish fit material for the poet ! 
Emerson's words are, " Sooner or later that 
which is now life shall be poetry, and every 
fair and manly trait shall add a richer strain to 
the song." 

That perfect harmony through all outward 
nature, which is the essence of beauty, he has 
indicated in a very familiar poem, " Each and 
All " : perhaps his best example of finished 
form. The poem has an absolutely perfect 
unity and simplicity ; it expresses fully its lofty 
lesson, yet there is scarcely a violent rhyme, 
a verse that will not scan, still less a sentence 



EMERSON 35 

that will not parse, in its fifty lines, all enfor- 
cing the truth, " Nothing is fair or good alone." 
This poem all should know by heart. 

Nearly the same thought occurs often in 
Emerson. Thus it flashes out in a glorious 
image, set to a strain of immortal music, in the 
midst of one longer poem, much of which 
moves in an air rather too remote and attenu- 
ated for most of us to breathe: I mean the 
second part of ''Woodnotes." The verses 
were, I think, selected by Bayard Taylor in his 
clever "Echo Club" as the sweetest of all 
Emersonian strains : 

" For Nature beats in perfect tune, 
And rounds with rhyme her every rune . . . 
Thou canst not wave thy staff in air, 

Or dip thy paddle in the lake, 
But it carves the bow of beauty there, 

And the ripples in rhyme the oar forsake." 

Almost as famous as "Each and All" is the 
" Problem." But here many readers are disposed 
to strip off like a husk the outer setting and 
nominal subject, to seize merely the illustrations, 
which are themselves a series of miniature lyrics. 
Especially beautiful is the reminder, how great- 



36 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

works of art, harmonizing perfectly with the 
natural scenery in which they are set, become 
themselves a part of nature's perfection. The 
lesson is enforced by a series of noble figures : 

" Earth proudly wears the Parthenon 
As the best gem upon her zone ; 
And Morning opes with haste her lids 
To gaze upon the Pyramids. 
O'er England's abbeys bends the sky, 
As on its friends with kindred eye. 
For out of thought's interior sphere 
These wonders rose to upper air ; 
And Nature gladly gave them place. 
Adopted them into her race, 
And granted them an equal date 
With Andes and with Ararat." 

(The last line may seem wilful, but it is by no 
means Emerson's boldest venture. He forces 
rhyme to his needs with all Dante's ruthlessness. 
It requires the Puritan's calm courage to cap bear 
with woodpecker, as he does in " Woodnotes" !) 

The fleeting nature of what we call property, 
the folly of mortal man who says of the earth 
*' It is mine," are set forth with resistless force 
in a tranquil lyric, which Emerson has dared 
to begin with a mere string of Concord family 



EMERSON 37 

names : following strangely upon the mystic 

Oriental title " Hamatreya." 

" Bulkely, Hunt, Willard, Hosiner, Merriam, Flint, 
Possessed the land." 

We shiver, as at the tread upon our own 
graves, when the same slow music glides fear- 
lessly on into the tragic truth of life : 

" Where are these men ? Asleep beneath their grounds, 
And strangers, fond as they, their furrows plough. 
Earth laughs in flowers, to see her boastful boys, 
Earth-proud, proud of the earth which is not theirs ; 
Who steer the plough, but cannot steer their feet 
Clear of the Grave." 

"The Snowstorm" is the least ethical or sig- 
nificant of the poems : hardly more than a pict- 
ure. But as such it almost rivals ''Snowbound" 
itself, though counting little more than a score 
of quiet verses. We are tempted to question 
how often, in any climate, 

" Announced by all the trumpets of the sky 
Arrives the snow," 

but it may have been so in 1834. Mr. Emerson 
has not given such copious proof of his accurate 
observation out-of-doors as Mr. Lowell and Col- 
onel Higginson : though even here " May-Day," 
and other passages, may well give us pause. 



^8 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

The brief poem " Rhodora " is a deep lesson 
in seemingly artless art. Beginning with a rem- 
iniscent picture, and gliding into a fancied con- 
versation, it leaves the sting of a great truth 
in our memory and is gone *'ere we are aware!" 

The relation of Emerson's verse to his prose 
may be illustrated by such poems as '' Compen- 
sation," which has condensed into eight lines, 
and crystallized there in a single image, the 
essential lesson of the famous essay bearing 
the same title. And we may add that the 
verses win a complete and unquestioning accept- 
ance; while the essay, in part at least, affects 
many readers as a beautiful, impressive, noble 
web of sophistical special pleading. Similarly, 
his code of manners is wonderfully packed into 
the eight lines called ''Forbearance"; though 
this masterpiece does not indeed make less 
indispensable the fuller teachings in " Social 
Aims." That he can elaborate an Elizabethan 
"conceit," even, as happily as Herrick, though 
not without touching it with a deeper tender- 
ness, is proved by the "Amulet." The next 
poem, " Thine Eyes still Shined," seems to 
a lover of Goethe's " Ich denke Dein " more 



EMERSON 39 

like a literary echo than anything else in the 
volume. 

Of the merely personal or subjective ele- 
ment, often too prominent in the lyric poet, we 
rarely have even a hint in Emerson. Of his 
brothers, two of whom, at least, but for their 
premature death, would have shared largely in 
his spirit, his influence, and his fame, he speaks 
tenderly in the " Dirge." But neither the rhyth- 
mic movement nor the lyric unity are noticeably 
strong here, and perhaps only the two closing 
lines will live : 

"The silent organ loudest chants 
The master's requiem." 

" Threnody," indeed, one of the most perfect 
among the longer poems, has a tenderly per- 
sonal side, being occasioned by the death of 
Emerson's child, a wonderfully precocious boy. 
It is in part, too, a vividly realistic picture of 
the beloved son's life. But the father's grief, 
like Tennyson's sorrow for his friend, Arthur 
Hallam, is but the occasion from which the 
poet's thoughts rise to the theme, accounted 
of men the loftiest and weightiest of all: the 



40 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

assurance of immortality. Through lighter 
thoughts, and more jocund pictures, a still 
longer poem, " May-Day," circles upward to 
the same clear final note of confident hope : 

"Through earth to ripen, through Heaven endure." 

Among his briefer lyrics, at least, Emerson's 
own favorite was " Days." As to the yet more 
famous '' Brahma," he seems to have been more 
amused than wounded by the ridicule and 
rather coarse banter with which this pearl of 
mystic truth was received, when it appeared in 
the first number of the ''Atlantic Monthly." 
The key to nearly all its difficulties is in the 
title, which should remind us that it is not the 
poet that speaks, but the all-pervasive, inde- 
structible Spirit Divine. Pantheism appealed 
strongly to Emerson. That Longfellow also 
felt the charm of the same mystical faith, may 
be seen from a beautiful interlude of the "Way- 
side Inn " : 

"It was his faith, perhaps is mine, 
That life in all its forms is one." 

Among other poems perfectly intelligible and 
enjoyable for any lover of verse are ** Good-by," 



EMERSON 41 

"The Humble-bee" (which owes somethmg, as 
Hawthorne hinted, in his ''Virtuoso's Collec- 
tion," to the Anacreontic apostrophe to the 
Cicada), the first "Woodnotes," and "Adiron- 
dacks " : a poem that Stillman, the leader of the 
actual excursion, has recently discussed in a 
notable paper. There is just a glorifying tinge 
of mysticism in " Waldeinsamkeit " and "Two 
Rivers." But our list must not grow to a cata- 
logue. Is it not Lowell who somewhere says, 
that we will thank him who points out the 
brook to us, but he need not catch us the trout } 
I need only assure the seeker that Emerson's 
slender rill, cold and clear from loftiest Parnas- 
sus, teems with shy beauties only waiting to be 
caught. 

Much of Emerson's poetic material never 
crystallized into coherent verse at all. A little 
was suppressed as unworthy, even after pub- 
lication, and not without reason. Since his 
death, quite a mass of fragments, found among 
his papers, has been printed with his poems. 
Here we find, for instance, " disjecta membra," 
large and small, of a poem on "The Poet," at 
which Emerson labored at intervals for more 



42 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

than twenty years; yet it never took shape. It 
is instructive to study these bits, as it is to 
examine the memoranda in Hawthorne's Amer- 
ican Notebooks, whether they were or were not 
successfully elaborated into tales in his later 
life. Occasionally a couplet or quatrain of 
these verses is as perfect as the best epigrams 
in the Greek Anthology. For instance, any 
man who wanders, in bereavement or disheart- 
enment, under the midnight sky, may be glad 
to have Emerson voice his feeling for him : 

" Teach me your mood, O patient stars, 
Who climb each night the ancient sky, 
Leaving on space no shade, no scars, 
No hate of age, no fear to die." 

Certainly, if he had a larger design into 
which such perfectly carved details could have 
fitted like metopes of a finished Greek temple, 
we may well regret that he never raised its 
walls. 

But like every true poet, Emerson was con- 
scious that there was much poetry in his soul too 
lofty, or of too ethereal essence, for utterance 
in words. There is a beautiful acknowledg- 



EMERSON 43 

ment of this in his " Forerunners." Each of 
our New England poets has expressed this 
same consciousness. Whittier's " The Van- 
ishers," Lowell's '' Envoi To the Muse," a part 
of Holmes' "The Voiceless," are remarkably 
close parallels with the " Forerunners." In 
" Prometheus," the "Wind over the Chimney," 
and elsewhere, Longfellow has felt — perhaps 
less deeply — that he, too, had rich treasures 
of inspiration which could never take form in 
uttered words. 

The present writer has a single far remem- 
brance, from his own boyhood, of Emerson as 
a lecturer upon "Eloquence" before the New 
England " Lyceum." The dry, silent smile 
with which the lecturer confessed his sense of 
incongruity between his theme and his delivery 
is still vividly recalled. Indeed, the deliberate 
half-dreamy utterance, the abstracted manner, 
the quiet tones of Emerson's old age, were not 
then as impressive, for boyish listeners, as the 
shallower, noisier oratory of the war-period. 
But, especially in smaller audiences of maturer 
hearers, he was throughout his long life sure 
of an eager and affectionate hearing. Lowell 



44 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

says, in his reverently critical paper upon " Em- 
erson the Lecturer" (pp. 383-4): *'How art- 
fully (for Emerson is a long-studied artist in 
these things) does the deliberate utterance, that 
seems waiting for the fit word, appear to admit 
us partners in the labor of thought, and make 
us feel as if the glance of humor were a sudden 
suggestion, as if the perfect phrase — lying 
written there on the desk — were as unexpected 
to him as to us." The whole passage — in- 
deed, the whole essay — should be read with 
care. 

Emerson's tranquil old age was characterized 
by a gradual failing of the memory, and finally 
by a form of aphasia, which limited greatly his 
power of communication with other men. But 
the grace of outward manner, and the perfect 
refinement of his inner nature, could never de- 
teriorate. Indeed it often seemed as if the soul 
within still mused on themes as lofty as of old, 
and only the bodily organs declined to transfuse 
thought into articulate speech. 

He was present, in the body, at Longfellow's 
funeral, and once whispered to his companion, 
"Who is the sleeper.?" But his real- self awoke 



EMERSON 45 

at nightfall, fully conscious that he had lost 
the day. Just one month later his own frame 
was at rest. 

At an earlier stage of life, when the first 
consciousness of lessening force admonished 
him, he composed the lines entitled " Ter- 
minus " : 

"It is time to be old, 
To take in sail." 

He does not overstate here the precious- 
ness of age (as Cicero's extravagant eulogium 
in the '' De Senectute " outbids Plato's mod- 
erate words on old age in the *' Republic "), 
nor say with Browning : 

" Grow old along with me ; 
The best is yet to be ; 
The last of life for which the first was made." 

Rather it is the cheerful resignation of Long- 
fellow's *' Morituri Salutamus " that we hear 
in Emerson's lines : 

" As a bird trims her to the gale, 

I trim myself to the storm of time ; 
I man the rudder, reef the sail, 
Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime." 



46 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

This last line Mr. Lowell once used most 
gracefully, applying; it to himself as Mr. 
Emerson's disciple of thirty years. " I at 
least," he says, "gladly 

"^Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime.'" 

Even the slow and painless decay of Emer- 
son's mind, before the body's dissolution, can 
give no touch of the tragic to a life so tran- 
quil and content, so full and rounded. There 
is no baffling of fond hopes, no rich promise 
unfulfilled, as when Catullus or Keats perishes 
untimely, or Poe and De Musset squander the 
rare gifts of genius. His message was fully 
and even repeatedly delivered : a message in- 
deed of sweetness and light, of unquestioning 
trust and faith. His art has stimulated many 
disciples, whether direct imitators, as even 
fiery-hearted Helen Hunt so often is, or strong 
masculine souls, like Lowell, that thank him 
rather for the bugle note of encouragement 
than for direct aid and suggestion. 

But the divine spirit of gentle peace and 
loving faith abiding in the man is even better 
than any direct teachings in his books. We 



EMERSON 



47 



of to-day find it simply impossible to imagine 
what the spiritual air of New England was 
before Emerson breathed his message and 
lived his life. 



Ill 

HAWTHORNE 

A Lonely Life 

There is a famous saying of Dr. Holmes', 
which unites the wit of the man and the physi- 
cian's wisdom, to the effect that a child's educa- 
tion should begin a hundred years before his 
own birth. The artistic triumph of Hawthorne 
came, with a certain suddenness, when the "Scar- 
let Letter" appeared in 1850. The romancer was 
then already past middle age, and had been at 
times disposed to regard himself as hopelessly 
belated, and foredoomed to failure. Yet it is 
doubtless generally felt that that book stands 
alone, by its originality of form, artistic com- 
pleteness, and deep insight into human nature, 
at the summit of our national literature. And 
not merely the solitary youth-time of the author 
himself, but the conditions of Salem society and 
his immediate ancestry through two centuries, 
48 



HAWTHORNE 49 

are clearly seen to have aided in perfecting this 
late-blooming, deep-hearted flower of imagina- 
tion, that graces the sombre, crumbling wall of 
New England Puritanism. 

A partial consciousness of cause for gratitude 
to the past glimmers upon the pages of the fa- 
mous introduction to the " Scarlet Letter." The 
frankness of such self-confession by Hawthorne 
is, to be sure, always elusive. He slips off 
merely an outer mask, while the artist, at least, 
if not the man, still conceals his real features 
only the more effectively. There is no suspi- 
cion of a smile, however, behind such sentences 
as these : 

'' I seem to have a stronger claim to a resi- 
dence here (i.e. in Salem) on account of this grave- 
bearded, sable-cloaked, and steeple-crowned pro- 
genitor, — who came so early, with his Bible 
and his sword, and trode the unworn street with . 
so stately a port. . .- . He was a soldier, legis- 
lator, judge ; he was a ruler in the church ; he 
had all the Puritanic traits, both good and evil." 
Then, after touching on the cruelty shown 
toward the Quakers by this first Hathorne of 
Salem, he continues : " His son, too, inherited 



50 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

the persecuting spirit, and made himself so con- 
spicuous in the martyrdom of the witches, that 
their blood may fairly be said to have left a stain 
upon him. So deep a stain, indeed, that his old, 
dry bones in the Charter Street burial-ground 
must still retain it, if they have not crumbled 
utterly to dust ! " The next sentence, express- 
ing the fear that these earliest ancestors, if 
unrepentant for their cruelties, may be "now 
groaning under the heavy consequences of them, 
in another state of being," is like a glimpse at 
that cornice of Dante's Purgatorial mount where 
Pride is atoned. And surely there is no hint of 
aught but the deepest earnest in the closing 
words : " At all events I, as their representa- 
tive, hereby take shame upon me for their sakes, 
and pray that any curse incurred by them, as I 
have heard, and as the dreary and unprosperous 
condition of the race, for many a long year 
back, would argue to exist, may be now and 
henceforth removed." 

This ancestral curse seems to have been in 
some sort a matter of family pride ; or, at least, 
was accepted with a consciousness that it could 
only cling to an ancient and masterful lineage : 



HAWTHORNE 51 

as the loyal old Keltic servant silenced the 
fears of the upstart family that had purchased 
the ancestral castle of her masters, '' Did ye 
think the Banshee would howl for the likes of 
yezf The creator of the ill-fated Pyncheons, 
in the " House of the Seven Gables," plainly 
borrows largely from his own memories and 
household traditions. The belief in the in- 
herited ban, doubtless, really aided in perpetu- 
ating the self-centred, companionless, silent 
tendencies of the Hawthornes. The roman- 
cer's immediate ancestry for several genera- 
tions had been mariners, in peace or war; and 
the life of a sea captain is preeminently a 
lonely, independent, and uncompanionable ex- 
istence. Nathaniel Hawthorne evidently felt 
that the occupancy of one home, and doubt- 
less "inbreeding," too, in Salem, had contin- 
ued too long for the good of his race ; and he 
made a life-long effort to widen his own hori- 
zon. 

Hawthorne was born in 1804. His father, 
a taciturn, book-loving sailor, died abroad 
when Nathaniel was but four years old. The 
widow never laid aside her mourning, nor re- 



52 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

sumed any save the most necessary intercourse 
with the outside world in the forty remaining 
years of her Hfe. Much of the boy's child- 
hood was spent under an uncle's roof in 
Maine, on the wild shores of Sebago Lake. 
Roaming the woods in summer with his gun, 
or skimming up and down the frozen lake for 
lonely miles in winter, he there first acquired 
if it was not inborn his lifelong delight in 
solitude. A prolonged lameness, which threat- 
ened to become permanent, confirmed in the 
boy a fondness for reading, especially of ro- 
mances and poetry, which the mother had 
never discouraged. Indeed, the mother of a 
restless boy, who discourages his habit of read- 
ing, is yet to be discovered. " Pilgrim's Prog- 
ress" was a lifelong favorite, and perhaps the 
one book whose pervasive influence can be 
traced in Hawthorne's mature work. 

At Bowdoin College the personal intercourse 
between students on the one side, and the in- 
structors, their families, and Brunswick society 
generally on the other, has always been of the 
slightest. The diversions of the sturdy, rudely 
trained Maine youths among themselves can 



HAWTHORNE 53 

hardly have appealed strongly to the more 
sensitive city-bred lad. Once, indeed, he is 
fined and under censure, with other students, 
for social wine-drinking and card-playing. But 
here again, as in recalling his boyhood, his 
most vivid and happy college memories are of 
long rambles through the pine forests of Maine. 
His studies did not arouse any craving for the 
higher scholarship, nor even for collegiate hon- 
ors. Indeed, the well-known distinction of so 
many Bowdoin graduates has been, I think, 
chiefly in other than purely scholastic careers. 
However, the rather motley collection of books 
in the college library encouraged his early 
fondness for desultory reading. Miss Peabody 
states that, in the little coterie where he was 
best beloved, Hawthorne, by his personal 
beauty, his shyness, and his fondness for ro- 
mantic story-telling, won the pet name of 
Oberon. This was, at any rate, one of sev- 
eral signatures under which he later dispersed 
and hid his literary fame. Hawthorne's class- 
mate Bridge says the romancer himself chose 
the name in those after years. 

A quarter century later he writes to Bridge, 



54 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

in dedicating to him the " Snow Image " : "I 
know not whence your faith came ; but while 
we were lads together at a country college, — 
gathering blueberries, in study-hours, under 
those tall academic pines; or watching the 
great logs as they tumbled along the current 
of the Androscoggin ; ... or catching trouts 
in that shadowy little stream which, I suppose, 
is still wandering riverward through the forest, 
though you and I will never cast a line in it 
again, — two idle lads, in short, . , . doing a 
hundred things that the Faculty never heard 
of, or else it had been the worse for us, — 
still it was your prognostic of your friend's 
destiny that he was to be a writer of fiction." 
This single, gracefully intertwined sentence — 
which I have even now abbreviated — illus- 
trates charmingly several Hawthornesque traits; 
his tenderness in friendship, his half-whim- 
sical self-depreciation, his lingering affection 
for past associations ; but, no less, his skill 
in detailed word-painting, his unerring choice 
of the most vivid expression, (and that final 
indescribable touch of tender grace that marks 
each sentence of his as an artist's own. 



HAWTHORNE 55 

But at the college gate Hawthorne parted 
for long years even from these comrades of 
what most men call their four happiest years. 
After graduation in 1825, returning to the 
silent, unsocial shelter of the Salem roof-tree, 
he became for the next eight or ten years 
more and more hermit-like in his daily rou- 
tine, for weeks together exchanging hardly a 
word even with the mother and the two sis- 
ters who shared the home with him. 

There has been, however, an exaggerated 
and distorted impression as to this period of 
seclusion in Hawthorne's life. In the first 
place, he was an athletic and perfectly healthy 
young man, delighting in long tramps, swim- 
ming, and vigorous exercise generally. He 
was an assiduous student, as a few of his writ- 
ings directly reveal. "The Virtuoso's Collec- 
tion," in particular, throws much curious light 
on Hawthorne's literary byways. 

In these years, also, his perfect literary 
style was created. We hardly needed Haw- 
thorne's own statement that this had cost him 
long effort : and wide reading is as essen- 
tial thereto as careful writing. His further 



56 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

remark, that he aimed only at the simplest 
and most direct expression of his thought, is 
also undoubtedly true, but most misleading 
to one who fails to remember how subtle, 
many-tinted, and evanescent a fanciful Haw- 
thornesque thought could be ! 

During these years Hawthorne held quite 
aloof from ordinary social life ; for which, 
indeed, he never had leisure or inclination. 
He was long debarred, also, from foreign 
travel, from such stimulating companionship 
as Cambridge or Concord might have offered 
him, and even to a great degree from his old 
intimate friends. But we know, from his 
American Notebooks and other sources, that 
he occasionally made prolonged journeys, or 
tours of observation, and that he was, both 
then and while at home in Salem, a close stu- 
dent,' an interested Spectator (to use the Addi- 
sonian word) of . the ordinary outward life 
about him. He says, self-depreciatingly, to 
Longfellow, that he had had a few glimpses 
at real life through a peep-hole, and these had 
occasioned the most successful of his produc- 
tions. But, to the keen receptive eye of a 



HAWTHORNE 5 7 

Hawthorne, more life and truth came through 
such a peep-hole than ever reaches most men 
in the broad daylight of the city street ! 

"In this dismal chamber," as he wrote in 
his Notebooks long afterward, " fame was 
won ! " The divine spark of life, of genius, 
no study in evolution has yet explained. 
Hawthorne's nature was pure, earnest, strong, 
and devoted. The conditions, the environment, 
we can now see, were favorable. The kin- 
dling flash is always a miracle from on high ! 

The growth of Hawthorne's reputation as 
an author was undoubtedly slow. It is more 
than a jest when he claims to have been for 
many years the obscurest writer in America. 
The conditions were most unfavorable for the 
prompt recognition of a modest and sensitive 
author. In fiction, especially, a rhetorical sen- 
timentality pervaded the dominant school, of 
which N. P. Willis was the best representative 
(and "Maria dell' Occidente," perhaps, one of 
the worst). The reading public was slow to 
acquire a purer taste, if, indeed, the best 
work is even yet absolutely popular. The 
old-fashioned Annuals and short-lived literary 



58 THE NEW ENGLAND POEFS 

magazines offered scanty returns in money or 
reputation. But Hawthorne's various iioms 
de plume, and anonymous publication, had 
also a large share in obscuring his fame. 
Some, at least, of his youthful works were 
widely appreciated, before his name was 
known at all. Thus in one early Annual 
fouvy unsigned stories of his appeared, not 
avowedly from the same hand, and all were 
warmly praised by an English reviewer, — 
probably Chorley, who afterward knew and 
loved the writer. 

When in 1837 Elizabeth Peabody, with 
characteristic energy, set out to discover the 
writer of the sketches that had delighted her 
in the *' New England Magazine," it was with 
great difficulty that she found they had been 
written in her own town of Salem, — that they 
were from the hand of a certain young Haw- 
thorne, — and, finally, that the Hawthorne in 
question could be no other than a half^forgot- 
ten playmate of her childhood. So, when he 
asks Bridge, "Was there ever such a weary 
delay in obtaining the slightest recognition 
from the public as in my case .? " we must 



HAWTHORNE 59 

remember, too, that he had eluded such rec- 
ognition almost as coyly as he afterward 
avoided the best social life England could 
offer him, and had little right to indulge, 
even half -jestingly, in querulousness as to 
either literary or personal recognition. 

The Peabodys seem to have been literally 
the only people with whom the Hawthornes 
had social relations, and it is no wonder if 
the invalid younger sister, Sophia Peabody, 
a woman of many gifts, artist, linguist, au- 
thoress, and above all, as a sympathetic critic, 
became almost instantly indispensable to him. 
Never was love at first sight more fully justi- 
fied by a lifetime of happiness and mutual 
helpfulness. In this same year, also, the first 
series of "Twicetold Tales" appeared in book 
form. Bridge, without Hawthorne's know- 
ledge, had guaranteed the timid publisher 
against loss upon the venture. Profit there 
seems to have been none for many years. 
Still, this marks an important turn in Haw- 
thorne's life. Within that circle whose opin- 
ions he valued his position was at once fixed. 
Longfellow, in particular, wrote an enthusi- 



6o THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

astic review of his classmate's book, and made 
efforts to draw him again into congenial per- 
sonal relations. 

From George Bancroft, then Collector of 
the Port of Boston, Hawthorne received in 
1839 ^^ appointment there as ganger and 
weigher. This he filled faithfully until turned 
out, in due routine, by the Whigs, in 1841. 
These years were brightened by his friend- 
ship with Hillard and others, by the slow 
growth of his literary fame, above all, by the 
constant and appreciative sympathy of Sophia 
Peabody. He had now, with the incentive of 
his troth-plight, saved a thousand dollars ; but 
poverty, the lady's delicate health, and also, 
possibly, Hawthorne's deference to the sup- 
posed wishes of his mother, still delayed their 
marriage. 

Hawthorne now embarked in the famous 
Brook Farm experiment of transcendental 
semi-communism, putting into the venture his 
hard-earned dollars, which he apparently never 
regained. The next spring he was looking for 
a suitable site on the Farm to build a cottage 
for his bride, — when on a sudden impulse 



HAWTHORNE 6 1 

he flung down his hoe, and turned his back 
on the Roxbury community forever. There 
seems to have been no adequate cause at the 
moment. We may fancy Margaret Fuller's 
dominance within-doors during her frequent 
visits, and work in the fields, hard enough to 
stifle all artistic creativeness, had slowly filled 
the cup of discontent, until it now quietly 
ran over. We certainly cannot regret an ex- 
perience to which we clearly owe the '* Blithe- 
dale Romance." In that book is enough 
autobiographic confession to explain his de- 
parture. The most whimsically surprising 
thing is that he tarried and toiled a year. 
There is one delicious backward glimpse from 
his next abode: " It has been an apo- 
phthegm these five thousand years, that toil 
sweetens the bread it earns. For my part 
(speaking from hard experience, acquired 
while belaboring the rugged furrows of Brook 
Farm), I relish best the free gifts of Provi- 
dence." (Preface to the " Mosses from an 
Old Manse.") 

In 1842 the second collection of " Twicetold 
Tales " was gathered up from forgotten maga- 



62 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

zines and published. Miss Peabody's long 
years of invalidism were ended. Love worked 
a prompter and completer miracle for the Haw- 
thornes than for the Brownings. Encouraged 
by an appointment as editor, — which presently 
failed him, — Hawthorne married in 1842, and 
settled in the old Manse at Concord, so per- 
fectly described in the introduction to the 
"Mosses." Here the happy young couple re- 
mained, swaying between simple comfort and 
absolute poverty, for three years. To their 
daughter Rose we are recently indebted for a 
delightful picture of " Hyperion," living con- 
tentedly as a vegetarian, perforce, on the prod- 
ucts of his own garden, and on berries from 
the neighboring fields, and performing all the 
drudgery of the kitchen with imperial grace, 
while his wife held the new-born baby, and di- 
rected the tasks she was forbidden to share ! 
There is no purer or quainter picture in the 
annals of genius. 

Hawthorne's second experience in political 
office-holding was as surveyor in the custom 
house of his native city, from 1846- 1849. 
The Introduction of the '* Scarlet Letter " has 



HAWTHORNE 63 

given an unwelcome immortality to his associ- 
ates therein ; and in the case of the '' Old In- 
spector," certainly, the artist's enjoyment in the 
portrayal made him unduly forgetful as to the 
natural sensitiveness of a live human subject. 
Even more than at Brook Farm, this daily 
mechanical employment deadened for the time 
Hawthorne's artistic existence. His dismissal, 
in 1849, occurred under exasperating conditions, 
and plunged him into distress and even lasting 
debt. But the blow was hailed joyfully by his 
wife with the words, " Now you can write your 
book!" The "Scarlet Letter," begun that 
very day, was indeed completed before they 
left Salem early in the next year. His mother's 
painful last illness and death, sickness for him- 
self and all his family, poverty, indebtedness, 
the slanders against his character circulated to 
excuse his removal from office, all darkened 
that eventful winter ! The other work of 
American fiction which would be most gener- 
ally accounted the rival of the '' Scarlet Letter," 
*' Uncle Tom's Cabin," was written a year or 
two later, piecemeal, beside the evening lamp, 
by a tired and busy mother, surrounded by the 



64 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

noisy circle of her children. So unconquerably 
does genius rise superior to untoward condi- 
tions ! 

The discovery of an actual scarlet letter, or 
of papers explaining its history, in the custom 
house attic, is a fiction. But in a deeper sense, 
as we hail this new creation upon a far larger 
plan than of old, we may really feel that we 
owe the book, in part, to those years of repres- 
sion and silence. The stream was only dammed 
and deepened : it could not be choked. 

The actual composition of the " Scarlet Let- 
ter" was remarkably rapid. When the Haw- 
thornes left Salem for Lenox, early in 1850, the 
book had appeared, and had been at once rec- 
ognized, both at home and in Europe, as a 
masterpiece. Fame had come, and worldly 
independence was assured. The next few 
years, despite three migrations in search of a 
home, were marked by happy and easy pro- 
duction. *' The House of the Seven Gables " 
and '' Wonderbook " were written in Lenox; 
the " Blithedale Romance" in West Newton; 
but already in June, 1852, Hawthorne had pur- 
chased and moved into Alcott's house, "The 



HAWTHORNE 65 

Wayside," in Concord. From " The Wayside " 
were sent forth only the " Tanglewood Tales " 
and the " Life of Franklin Pierce." 

These changes of abode may perhaps have 
proved in one respect an aid to the romancer's 
art. It is worth noticing that in each of his 
large works he required, after the closest local 
study, the hazier perspective of distance, both 
in time and space. The "Scarlet Letter," whose 
scene is laid in Boston, took shape in Salem, 
long after his two years of Bostonian life. 
The Salem story, in turn, was written when the 
Hawthornes were in Lenox. The Brook Farm 
experience deadened his literary impulses at 
the time, and the " Blithedale Romance " was 
sent forth, ten years later, from a very different 
home. Even the *' Marble Faun " was not 
written chiefly in Italy, but under the gray 
English skies. 

Upon the accession of Pierce to the Presi- 
dency, Hawthorne was offered the lucrative 
consulship at Liverpool. Here he spent four 
years, a blank in his literary life, except for 
the confidential English notebooks. To the 
two years following, passed in Italy, is due, at 

F 



66 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

least, the outward form of his last masterpiece, 
the " Marble Faun," though it was not writ- 
ten until 1859-1860. The distressing illness 
of his daughter Una, at Rome, during 1858, 
undermined Hawthorne's own constitution, and 
the four years of declining health at home, 
1 860- 1 864, brought the early end of his life- 
story. These last years were chiefly occupied 
with uncompleted experiments which were really 
variations upon one theme, — the *' Elixir of 
Life." 

His wife survived him by ten years. His 
only son is by some critics, notably by R. H. 
Stoddard, set nearly at the head of living 
romancers. Una, his well-beloved eldest child, 
died soon after him ; the youngest has lived to 
become the wife — now the widow — of an 
American man of letters. 

Hawthorne satisfied Solon's conditions of a 
happy life, and died painlessly, with no previous 
break in his own family circle, and in the full 
splendor of his fame. It is the belief of his 
most admiring and sympathetic critics, that his 
later works, even if completed, would not have 
surpassed his finished masterpieces, nor shown 



HAWTHORNE 67 

a material widening of his scope. Compared 
with the long and tranquil old age of Whittier 
and Holmes, his life seems brief, and his death 
untimely : yet each career has a completeness 
and harmony of its own. But it is time to turn 
altogether to the more important side of Haw- 
thorne's life, — his artistic activity. 



The Earlier Sketches 

Some poetic and creative writers hardly 
appear to have a development at all. Thus 
Bryant wrote two poems in his boyhood, which 
the man of eighty had never surpassed ; nor 
did his tones ever undergo an essential change. 
Hawthorne's art evidently had a very deliber- 
ate, orderly process of growth. Unhappily the 
materials for tracing that growth are to some 
extent lost, and in large degree confused. 

His sister has preserved some verses written 
by him at sixteen. They have the aimless 
mock-melancholy, and the effort to describe 
nature without real study of her, that so often 
characterize boyish poetry. 



68 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

" The wind sighs through the trees around. 
And the leaves send forth a gentle sound, 
Like the voices of a dream." 

From very similar beginnings, Longfellow's 
real poetic powers developed ; but in Haw- 
thorne such experiments only indicate early 
attention to the sound of words and the graces 
of style. (For music, curiously enough, he, like 
Emerson, never had any adequate apprecia- 
tion or ear.) In other fragments, preserved in 
his letters, he is less earnest. A serial paper^ 
edited chiefly for the eyes of his sisters, has 
some keen flashes of humor from the boy's pen. 
that prove the ancient adage true, by fore- 
shadowing the man's deeper yet gentle irony. 

As a student in college, Hawthorne wrote 
'' Seven Tales of my Native Land," and after 
making serious efforts to have them published, 
burned them in a fit of despondency. These, 
if preserved, would probably have shown a 
kinship to Poe's more grewsome stories. Proba- 
bly all that was valuable was remembered and 
utilized again in stories still surviving. Three 
years later, in 1828, his romance " Fanshawe " 
was actually printed, and a few copies sold. It 



HAWTHORNE 69 

is rather gracefully written, slight and un- 
natural in plot, and vague in characterization. 
The realistic glimpses of Bowdoin are pleasing, 
but it is not in any respect an important piece 
of work. Nathaniel Hawthorne at twenty-four 
was distinctly inferior in force to Marion Craw- 
ford, — not to mention prodigies like Barrie 
or Kipling. The greatest artists are perhaps 
oftener not precocious. 

From this period onward, until past his forti- 
eth year, we have really a single large stage of 
Hawthorne's development, represented by the 
short sketches, essays, and stories collected in 
the two volumes of "Twicetold Tales," the 
" Mosses," and the ''Snow Image." These are 
not arranged, chronologically or otherwise. No 
one of the four volumes is either homogeneous 
in itself, or clearly distinguishable from the rest. 
Each gleaning went far back, and included 
some of his earliest publications. The pref- 
ace to the ''Snow Image," in 185 1, finally de- 
clares that this volume includes everything of 
the kind worth preserving, and that there will 
be no more. Hawthorne had then, indeed, 
already acquired the full mastery of a larger 



70 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

style. The great romances were taking shape 
in rapid succession. 

It is doubtful whether the works of this period 
ever can be restored to the true order of their 
creation. Even when the date of original publi- 
cation is known, the author may have had the 
story, not merely growing under his hand, but 
lying uncalled-for in his desk for years previous. 
Julian Hawthorne's additions to the published 
American Notes (" Nathaniel Hawthorne and 
his Wife," I, pp. 488-505) offer no dates, and 
only show that the complete and dated volumes 
of this precious journal, properly edited and 
published, might often enable us to trace the 
genesis of a completed work, from the first 
germ of the romancer's fancy. While so much 
has been made public of the private life which 
Nathaniel Hawthorne would have screened 
from our too curious eyes, this essential service 
to our greatest literary character has never been 
duly rendered. We do not know, even, to just 
what extent the authentic materials exist for a 
history of his artistic growth. A mere rear- 
rangement of these eighty pieces in the true 
order of their creation would be of great value, 



HAWTHORNE 71 

for they have little in common, save a trans- 
lucent style, and a certain artistic completeness 
within narrow limits. 

It seems important, thus early in our analy- 
sis, to insist upon an essential truth, — that the 
artist is a moral teacher, though he is a very 
imperfect artist if his pictures need a dogmatic 
sermon attached, to point out or enforce their 
lesson ! He creates beauty, indeed, but beauty 
so true to our own ideal nature that it shall 
inevitably lift our hearts upward toward its 
own purer realm. This fundamental canon 
would perhaps exclude altogether from a place 
among the permanent fruits of Hawthorne's 
genius a few stories like " Mrs. Bullfrog " and 
" Mr. Higginbotham's Catastrophe." Though 
they have a rough plot, yet they seem cruder 
by far than the mere sketches to be mentioned 
presently, and indicate that Hawthorne's clever- 
ness in narration antedated the growth of his 
artistic morality. The unpleasant melodrama 
of "■ John Inglefield's Thanksgiving," the crude 
incompleteness of " Sylph Etheredge," even the 
excessively tragic atonement in " Roger Mal- 
vin's Burial," appear to mark them also as early 



72 



THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 



work, of a time when Hawthorne was still 
groping toward the moral and aesthetic laws 
that must guide his art. 

In each collection, again, there are some 
sketches of actual experience, or even of nat- 
ural scenery, which might well be mere 
"studies," cut bodily out from the pages of 
the American Notebooks : studies for back- 
grounds, we may call them. Such are the 
"Sights from a Steeple," "Sketches from Mem- 
ory," " Footprints on the Seashore," " Old 
Ticonderoga." They are of value, like the 
Notebooks themselves, chiefly as proof that 
our first great creative writer was no vague 
dreamy impressionist, but taught his hand by 
yearlong practice to set down in the fewest 
and truest strokes what his eye had seen 
aright. Hawthorne's precise meaning may 
often elude us, but the artist himself is always 
wide awake, his vision unblurred ; and this 
vision includes a clear comprehension of the 
ethical meaning which is the soul of artistic 
work. To his airiest creations he himself 
stands in the attitude of "the chorus in 
a classic play, which seems to be set aloof 



HAWTHORNE 73 

from the possibility of personal concernment" 
Above all, though the clouds of passion may 
hide the very skies from his storm-tost sinners 
and sufferers, the artist's view of moral law and 
eternal justice is still unobscured. " It is his 
office to . . . distil in his long brooding thought 
the whole morality of the performance," says 
Miles Coverdale. 

Among these sketches which we call studies 
for backgrounds, we are especially interested 
in the elaborate contribution which Hawthorne 
originally made to his elder sister's book. It 
is called "Main Street," and traces, in a pano- 
rama, the gradual transformation from the 
untrodden wilderness to the bustling thorough- 
fare of to-day. It is an almost equally vivid 
panorama of the romancer's own growth. Here 
already the dramatic, the human interest, begins 
to invade the foreground. His close study of 
New England history appears. He shows an 
especial interest in the tragic scenes of per- 
secution and of deluded belief in witchcraft, 
on which he brooded so long and so fruitfully. 
Such earlier studies made the "Scarlet Letter" 
possible at last. Over the brief dialogues 



74 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

between the patient showman and his various 
critics, Hawthorne's humor plays more broadly 
than usual. We are reminded here, especially, 
of the slashing '' editorial footnotes " with which 
he befooled so many serious readers in one of 
his latest publications, the "Atlantic Monthly " 
essay, "Chiefly about War Matters." Indeed, 
Hawthorne's humor usually turns its keenest 
edge upon his own sober sentiment. 

In connection with " Main Street " may per- 
haps be mentioned the happiest of Hawthorne's 
purely local pictures, " A Rill from the Town 
Pump." This was the "monument more last-. 
ing than bronze," by which, as he declared, his 
ungrateful townspeople in Salem would remem- 
ber him. It has had a curious and manifold 
fate, having even done service as a temperance 
tract ! It is perhaps the brightest and most 
agreeable glimpse of Hawthorne as a keen 
observer and spectator, watching the simple 
pageant of village life. 

Among the most delightful of Hawthorne's 
short pieces, many are, as it were, dramatized 
chapters from early New England history. 
Our readers are no doubt familiar with the 



HAWTHORNE 75 

''Maypole of Merry Mount," ''The Gentle 
Boy," "The Gray Champion," with "Lady 
Eleanore's Mantle," and the other " Province 
House " legends, " Endicott and the Red Cross," 
— and we may add "Major Molineux," for 
which Longfellow expressed his appreciation, 
greatly to the romancer's delight, in his own 
" Tales of a Wayside Inn." This lurid night- 
piece, however, seems in the main a remarkably 
bold creation of Hawthorne's own fancy. In 
particular, he has depicted, once for all, those 
crises in our earlier history most capable of re- 
vealing the heroic moral fibre of our forefathers. 
Yet his admiration for Endicott's courage, 
for example, never blinds him to the darker 
side of Puritanic virtue. Thus, in " Endicott 
and the Red Cross," the men of Boston are 
reminded in stirring words how for liberty of 
conscience they had abandoned home and 
crossed the seas, but — " Call you this liberty 
of conscience.'*" interrupted the Wanton Gos- 
peller, pilloried upon the church steps, at the 
very crisis of the bold governor's appeal, and 
"a sad and quiet smile flitted across the mild 
visage of Roger Williams," who stands for the 



76 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

chorus, for the interested spectator, for the 
author himself. 

We realize the romancer's attachment to the 
land of his birth, also, from the eternal associa- 
tion of a beautiful truth with the most wonder- 
ful natural feature of New Hampshire, in "The 
Great Stone Face." Incidentally, too, Haw- 
thorne's youthful reverence for Daniel Webster 
is here recorded. In the " Great Carbuncle," 
also, a popular legend of the White Hills is 
crystallized and partly allegorized ; and here 
we approach, perhaps, a weaker side of Haw- 
thorne's art. 

The predominant influence of Bunyan upon 
him has been often noted. His debt to the 
inspired tinker is loyally and most happily paid 
in "The Celestial Railroad," which seems to 
bring the beloved apologue down to date, in 
good faith and earnest. It would have been 
well if Hawthorne could have rested there. 
" Little Datfydowndilly," indeed, with the 
wearily recurring faces of Mr. Toil's brothers, 
may be harmlessly relegated to a volume for 
children, though even they would soon learn 
to skip it! (The juvenile generation educated 



HAWTHORNE 77 

upon " St. Nicholas " is quick to recognize 
and decline a thinly sugared sermon. Any 
doubter is advised to try his beloved " Flowers 
for Children," or one of Miss Edgeworth's edi- 
fying tales, upon his own more enlightened 
progeny ; or, — " Experto crede ! ") Sometimes, 
above all in the lovely " Snow Image," the 
truthful tale stands unspoiled for the childish 
reader ; while the moral, unforced, steals into 
the very soul of the man who reads over his 
boy's shoulder. *' Feathertop " we accept with 
a tolerant smile, as a Puritanic transmogrifica- 
tion of Anderson's '' Man without Clothes." 

But in e.o-. "Three Wishes," and even in the 
much-praised '' Ethan Brand," we realize that 
the story is created only for its didactic inter- 
pretation at the last. The moral should not be 
the evident parent of the marvel. Even Haw- 
thorne's voice grows strident, when we thus 
detect the set purpose to preach. '' Pilgrim's 
Progress" itself, some one has said, is enjoyed 
chiefly by children, who do not detect its moral 
purpose, or by " grown-ups," chiefly as a mem- 
ory of their own childhood. 

Distinctly wearisome, despite much wisdom 



78 THE NEW ENGI^ND POETS 

and power in the details, are the attempts of 
Hawthorne, starting avowedly with abstrac- 
tions or unrealities, to give them a visible shape 
in art. Such are '* The Procession of Life," 
" Earth's Holocaust," '' Fancy's Showbox," 
"The Hollow of Three Hills," and too many 
others. Of course, even in the least hopeful 
field, genius may score a success, and of this 
" A Virtuoso's Collection " is perhaps an ex- 
ample. But certainly one such loose-threaded 
string of curios was quite enough, and the " In- 
telligence Office" is a rather feeble repetition 
on the same theme. 

Hawthorne's own strongest interest at this 
period seems to have been devoted in large 
part to a certain class of supernatural prob- 
lems, represented, perhaps, best by *' Rapac- 
cini's Daughter," or by '' The Artist of the 
Beautiful." "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment " is 
a gem in this group (if it may be fairly in- 
cluded), and, besides its brilliant dramatic pict- 
ure of the four old Ne'er-do-weels and their 
brief rejuvenation, is important, because Haw- 
thorne in his last years recurred persistently 
to the same theme, — the elixir of youth. This 



HAWTHORNE 79 

story has a moral, I believe, but is so well told 
that we can forget it. 

These sketches are the most delicately 
thought out and wrought out of all his works. 
They seem to hover upon the very verge and 
limit of human life and thought and utterance. 
But they hardly bring back a lesson of vital 
value to men ; and we are constantly tanta- 
lized with a hint of allegory unexplained. It 
is interesting to note that they had this effect 
even upon their author, when he had had time 
to forget the precise mood in which they had 
taken shape. " Upon my honor, I am not 
quite sure that I entirely comprehend my own 
meaning in some of these blasted allegories." 
(Letter of April 13, 1854, quoted in Field's 
'* Yesterdays with Authors.") 

As was said before, Hawthorne recurred to 
these supernatural tendencies in his declining 
years. But in his central period, in which were 
produced his four larger masterworks, this mys- 
tical — not to say mystifying — vein is in abey- 
ance, and the artist breathes our earthly air, his 
feet are planted on the bedrock of human nat- 
ure, his characters and their lives are clearly 



So THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

interpreted to us in the light of our mortal 
experience. " But that is another story." 

As to the vexed question of Hawthorne's 
morbidness, the answer is already indicated. 
Despite some very human perversities in the 
man, as an artist he is sane and healthy. His 
faith in the eternal goodness and wisdom never 
fails. Nevertheless, the effect of some of these 
sketches upon our own youthful imagination 
was painful and abnormal. A really grewsome 
image is far more easily summoned up to the 
childish mind, than explained or allegorized 
away again. Hawthorne knew Young Good- 
man Brown saw no evil in the forest, which 
he did not take thither in his own heart; and 
almost any man, at forty year, can walk the 
dimmest wood path, and never wish to glance 
back and be reassured lest 

" A frightful fiend 
Doth close behind him tread." 

But at ten (or twenty) no nervous boy should 
thread the forest ways in Young Goodman 
Brown's company. On the closing pages of 
"The White Old Maid," in the library copy 



HAWTHORNE 8i 

from which I refresh my memories of " Twice- 
told Tales," a tremulous childish hand has writ- 
ten Au Aivful Book. We feel the shudder 
of those young nerves. Hawthorne inherited 
from his Salem lineage, or received as the 
artist's birthright, a daring imagination, which 
his healthy, happy, and moral maturity held 
in firm control. Not all its unearthly vis- 
ions are fit stimulus for the untrained fancies 
of our weaker youth. It should be added, 
however, that these tales were never intended 
for immature readers, though the pure sim- 
plicity of their diction has given some of them 
a wide currency in the schoolroom. In work 
expressly intended for childhood Hawthorne is 
remarkably tender, and scrupulously anxious 
to exclude what might horrify or perturb an 
innocent heart. 

We would not let any hint of discontent 
weaken our full utterance of thankfulness to 
Hawthorne for the many-sided beauty he has 
created for us. With all the brilliant clever- 
ness of the present generation, devoted above 
all else to the short story, a volume containing 
the best twenty, or fifty, American tales would 



82 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

still include a far greater number from this 
earlier hand than from any other : and no rival 
has approached the fields he has made pecul- 
iarly his own. 

Hawthorne's Great Romances 

If Hawthorne could revisit us, it would espe- 
cially tickle his whimsical humor to find his works 
elevated to the dignity of classics, of which men 
dare not confess ignorance, and timidly hint dis- 
approval if they feel it. Yet in all such cases 
the silent dissenters are really numerous. Any 
man knows among his own kin, his dearest 
friends, his best pupils perhaps, many whom he 
can never induce to read his favorite poet, be it 
Beranger, or Herrick, or Omar Khayyam ! Na- 
thaniel Hawthorne seems to me, as to so many 
others, the most perfect artist in form, the most 
original creative genius, and the most consum- 
mate master of style yet born upon American 
soil. Yet I doubt if he is really a general favor- 
ite, even among refined, thoughtful, and sensitive 
people. 

Perhaps the commonest reason alleged by 



HAWTHORNE 8;^ 

those who "cannot read" Hawthorne is his 
mystical vein. It is only an aggravation, they 
often say, that the Qiysticism is after all largely, 
perhaps wholly, deliberate mystification. Across 
the clouds of supernaturalism, witchcraft, alle- 
gorical symbolism, they too often catch a 
glimpse of the creative wizard's own face, 
wreathed in a shrewd incredulous Yankee smile, 
mocking those who half-accept what he has 
seemingly tried so hard to make them believe 
with him. 

The first advice we would give to those ma- 
ture and earnest folk, not wholly devoid of im- 
agination and humor, for whom the Hawthorne 
hedge has proved impassable, would be, to be- 
gin — not with the briefer tales however famous, 
but — with the great finished romances, and, 
particularly, with the first and unrivalled master- 
piece, the "Scarlet Letter." The man who is 
unable to finish that should close Hawthorne, if 
not all romantic literature, in something very 
like despair, and plunge for a half decade, at 
least, into the profoundest depths of experience, 
"Ay, into Life's deep stream." 

In that brief and happiest central period of 



84 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

his life, when three of the four great romances 
followed each other in such rapid succession, 
this transcendental vein, be it mystical or mys- 
tifying, was almost suppressed. "The artist 
breathes our earthly air, his feet are planted on 
the bedrock of human nature, his characters and 
their lives are clearly interpreted to us in the 
light of our own mortal experience." 

First and greatest of these characters is the 
heroic woman who, by life-long atonement, makes 
the shameful scarlet letter an emblem of mercy, 
love, and self-sacrifice. There is certainly no 
need — it would be indeed an idle audacity — to 
offer any detailed explanation of this eternally 
truthful picture. From the consequences of sin 
there is no outward escape, no successful flight 
toward earthly happiness, because the true 
stigma is burned into the soul itself. For that 
one mad hour of revived and unbridled hope in 
the forest, the weaker and guiltier Arthur atones 
with willing ignominy and death, the stronger 
woman-nature with many years of self-imposed 
childless loneliness and ignoble toil. 

At the close, as at the beginning, of the tale, 
Hester stands upon a lonely pedestal of sorrow. 



HAWTHORNE 85 

There is no more statuesque woman-shape in all 
literature. Even there, upon the scaffold, neither 
the dying Arthur Dimmesdale, nor the wronged 
husband, old Roger Chillingworth, nor the inno- 
cent child Pearl, can distract our sympathy and 
admiration for an instant from her who domi- 
nates them all, and upholds her two loved ones. 
As I write, the world has hardly done greeting 
a far more questionable apotheosis of woman 
triumphant over her own degradation, in " Tril- 
by." But exquisite and appealing as that inter- 
national romance of Bohemianism is, I am sure 
Du Maurier himself would have eagerly declared, 
that in his new field he was still only worthy to 
be called the gifted pupil of Thackeray, of 
George Eliot, and of Hawthorne. 

A helpful lesson any great work of art un- 
doubtedly has, for the later artist as well as for 
us who attempt the shaping of nothing save our 
own characters. The lesson, indeed, is per- 
haps in its essence the same for both. Let 
the Notebooks of your experience be as full 
as possible of accurate observation clearly delin- 
eated. For your work of art select and com- 
bine, within your finite limitations, that which 



86 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

seems to you above all else eternally true. Call 
into action natural and helpful impulses, and 
have no question that the result will be in har- 
mony with everlasting justice and love. Just 
what form the issue will take, the artist does 
not always foresee : still less can we forecast 
our own earthly lot. But in a well-planned 
romance, as in an earnest life, character works 
out its own due recompense at last. 

It is true that in the " Scarlet Letter," as in 
" Adam Bede," the chief action of the drama is 
set in motion by a grievous sin. But sin, evil 
— and here we touch the heart of Hawthorne's, 
of George Eliot's, of Emerson's creed — is no 
malignant, demoniacal power contradicting and 
thwarting the will of Heaven and accomplish- 
ing at last its own purposes. It is but estrange- 
ment, distortion, misuse, of impulses not in 
themselves accurst ; and therefore through 
repentance, atonement, and penance it may 
work out the blessedness even of the sinner. 
Hester and Arthur fell through passionate 
mutual love ; and that love, though so sin- 
stained, is never actually destroyed, but, puri- 
fied and spiritualized, supports Arthur in 



HAWTHORNE 87 

death, and Hester in the heavier trial of Hfe. 
This is not, indeed, a truth which would have 
been tolerated by the grim Puritans of Endi- 
cott's day ; but it is undoubtedly what Haw- 
thorne, like George Eliot, Du Maurier, indeed 
nearly all the true artists and liberal-minded 
thinkers of our century, believe and teach. 

In one outward feature the " Scarlet Letter " 
is unique among Hawthorne's larger works : 
perhaps almost unique in the whole history of 
dramatic fiction. I have quoted already the 
words in which Miles Coverdale, the gentle 
poet of the "Blithedale Romance," announces 
himself as the chorus, witnessing a drama in 
which he plays no aggressive part. Such a 
role the young photographer holds, amid the 
more mildly tragic scenes in the " House of the 
Seven Gables." Beside Miriam and Donatello, 
both the interested man of marble and the 
shrinking unwilling Hilda stand as spectators, 
safely aloof from the current of guilt. But in 
the " Scarlet Letter " there is no such resting- 
point for the thought. All in the group of 
characters are deeply involved ; all save the 
unconscious child Pearl share fully in the guilt. 



88 THE NEW ENGLAND 1\>ETS 

By his vital interest in the result and his 
struggle to misdirect it, old Roger Chilling- 
worth loses the power his intellect, and purity 
in act, should have given him. This makes the 
" Wind of Destiny " seem more resistless here 
even than in the other romances, and gives to 
all the scenes a certain merciless inevitableness 
which saddens the reader. Yet it is a sadness 
from which springs full soon an austere and 
pure satisfaction. Indeed, we are as it were 
drawn in, ourselves, to hold the balance of jus- 
tice, or at least to bear witness that Destiny has 
held it aright. 

The "House of the Seven Gables" is, upon 
the whole, indicative of a happier and less 
brooding mood of the artist. Phoebe, especially, 
the cheery little country lass, must have been 
a delightful surprise even to the romancer, who 
sometimes repined that he could not move, as 
an artist, among bright scenes and happy 
characters. The finale, also, despite the too 
prolonged death scene, throws at least a mellow 
autumnal gleam of sunshine even upon the 
grim doom of heredity which had darkened 
the earlier pages. The tale is as perfect as the 



HAWTHORNE 89 

" Scarlet Letter," the details are more exquisitely 
wrought; but it has not such an overwhelming 
power over the reader as the earlier tragedy 
exerts. Hawthorne felt that it contained more 
of his truest self. 

The " Blithedale Romance " has for its cen- 
tral figure a character, seemingly drawn in part 
from reality, who wrecks his own and other 
lives by attempting to be the merciless master 
of his own fate and theirs. I confess, however, 
my own observation has not given me many 
glimpses of such characters as Rollings worth, 
and I surely do not yet rightly understand him, 
since his punishment seems out of all propor- 
tion to his acts. Hawthorne is not purely the 
artist in this book, since there is a large element 
of realism, drawn from the Brook Farm experi- 
ence. Even Zenobia could hardly have existed 
without the traits and tricks contributed to 
her, as to a second Pandora, by Margaret 
Fuller. Colonel Higgin.son has found it easy 
to catalogue a yet more striking list of differ- 
ences. We knew Hawthorne was a creative 
artist, not a reporter. The thrilling closing 
scene, in which the beautiful Zenobia is found 



QO THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

drowned, is also transferred, with hardly a 
variation in detail, from a real night experience 
of Hawthorne on Concord River. I am inclined 
to feel that but for that grim bit of realism in 
Hawthorne's actual life, — and possibly Mar- 
garet Fuller's death by drowning, — the ro- 
mance might have had a far less tragic close. 
Zenobia's fate hardly seems inevitable, any 
more than Hollingsworth's. Altogether, the 
book is intensely interesting, but not so un- 
questionably successful, artistically, as any of 
its three rivals. It seems as if the spirit and 
the material body of Hawthorne's creation were 
no longer quite harmonized. Certainly we are 
less sure of Hawthorne's own happiness in his 
task while he wrote it, than when Hepzibah, 
Clifford, and Phoebe were growing to life under 
his wand. 

The '' Marble Faun" — known in England as 
'* Transformation " - — is the only example of 
Hawthorne's "third style," as we say in regard 
to Titian or Murillo ; of the period when his 
eyes were opened to the glories of classical and 
modern sculpture, to the natural scenery and 
architecture of Italy. For the background of 



HAWTHORNE 9 1 

his last great romance this has undoubtedly 
provided far greater richness and variety of 
color and form. (The book has since been 
utilized — with abundant illustration — as a sort 
of advanced guide-book for the grand tour of 
Italy : though Hawthorne's accuracy is hardly 
of the plodding sort that makes this a safe 
recourse ! ) But his art as a romancer had 
made no corresponding step upward. Indeed, 
there was doubtless no loftier height left for it 
to attain. Perhaps the process by which the 
consciousness of sin educates the soul is more 
distinctly indicated in the naive, untutored 
Donatello, than in the proud, silent, self-con- 
tained nature of Hester : but more than indi- 
cated it could not be, after all. Not even a 
Hawthorne could really work out visibly to 
men's eyes that problem toward whose solution 
each human soul can but timidly and darkly 
grope. And even the larger and oft-varied 
scenery of the " Marble Faun," though so de- 
lightful in itself, is perhaps less suited to Haw- 
thorne's small group of perplexed and absorbed 
human actors, than is the little Puritan settle- 
ment on the edge of the mysterious, haunted 



92 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

forest, or the dim, ghost-tenanted old mansion 
in a quiet Salem street. 

As for the plot, we may be wrong, ideally, in 
demanding anything more than the ethereal or 
spiritual solution, — the completion of Donatello's 
education ; but there is much truth in the com- 
plaint, that all imaginative literature heretofore, 
all Hawthorne's own stories, and even hints in 
the course of these scenes themselves, had led us 
to expect some final explanation as to Dona- 
tello's deed and his punishment, which would 
satisfy — I will not say our curiosity, for we 
know he is a creature of Hawthorne's, after all, 
but — our sense of artistic justice and finish. 
The reluctant final chapter of the second 
edition, we may all well agree with Hawthorne 
himself, is worthless. It only shows that in 
regard to these questions, and as to Miriam's 
earlier history as well, he had himself nothing 
to offer us. 

The general conclusion, then, appears to be 
clear. The perfect harmony between the out- 
ward materials, the spirit of the drama, and the 
purpose of the artist, which we feel in the 
" Scarlet Letter " and the '' House of the Seven 



HAWTHORNE 93 

Gables," no longer exists intact. It may be that 
the problems now called up were too great for 
solution, though this seems hardly consistent, 
because the flaw so universally felt is rather in 
the external setting than in the innermost spirit- 
ual problem of the book. Hawthorne the man, 
the scholar, the philosopher, had developed 
greatly in many directions, — even the writer 
has many an added grace ; but Hawthorne 
the artist had culminated in Salem and Lenox. 
Perhaps we may fairly cite in support of this 
belief, the fact that the rest of Hawthorne's 
literary life was merely a succession of dissatis- 
fied efforts and uncompleted beginnings. Fail- 
ing health does not necessarily bring such loss 
of power, as the beloved exile in Samoa has so 
happily demonstrated to the last glimmer of 
the candle. 



The Lesser Works 

Hawthorne's consummate success, at his best, 
requires us to mention, at least in passing, his 
less important utterances. Despite their great 
interest as materials for the biography, both of 



94 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

man and artist, the Notebooks are hardly more 
than their title implies. Even the selected 
English sketches, published in the volume called 
" Our Old Home," stand almost wholly outside 
Hawthorne's creative workshop. 

The slight outline of New England history, 
entitled *' Grandfather's Chair," could hardly be 
expected to throw a brilliant light upon the 
rather obscure and homespun tapestry of our 
annals. Some scenes and characters, notably 
Betsy Hull and her dowry of pine-tree shillings, 
come out in bright relief. The Salem witch- 
craft and the battle scenes Hawthorne felt to 
be ill-suited to his audience of children, and he 
hurries over them as lightly as he can. The 
half-dozen biographical sketches show, again, 
that Hawthorne did faithfully and with care 
whatever he took in hand. But the whole 
volume leaves us the impression that his ro- 
mances and tales of fiction are truer than his 
"True Stories," because more alive. 

The "Wonderbook" and "Tanglewood Tales" 
are more truly Hawthornesque, for despite the 
classical elements each tale is also a poetic 
creation. The two modest volumes form to- 



HAWTHORNE 95 

gether essentially one work, recasting a dozen 
famous Greek myths, nominally for a group of 
New England children — really for a much 
larger circle. It is no more a safe text-book of 
classical mythology than one which could be 
made up from Keats' or Tennyson's poems. 
Rather they are curious examples of the trans- 
formation these immortal myths undergo, in the 
alembic of a modern and Puritanic romancer's 
mind. We would gladly have, to set beside 
them, some of the merry recitals of Whittier's 
'' Snowbound " Schoolmaster, wherein 

" Litde seemed at best the odds 
'Twixt Yankee pedlers and old gods : 
. . . And dread Olympus at his will 
Become a huckleberry hill." 

These classical stories are, however, a crea- 
tion of genius, though flung off in a playful 
hour. Many details from the life with his 
children in Lenox are utilized, in the interludes 
of the " Wonderbook " especially, and both his 
tenderness as a father and his quaint, quiet 
humor are here seen at their best. 

To the four unfinished experiments of Haw- 
thorne's last years, we have already referred. 



96 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

His own deliberate wish would, no doubt, have 
been to recall those published, g.nd to destroy 
them all. They have been discussed quite 
carefully by the author's son Julian, himself a 
clever craftsman in literature. They are per- 
haps most interesting on the technical side, or, 
indeed, we may almost say, pathologically; 
especially to those who regard literary creation 
as a progressive art, which they can acquire and 
improve upon. It is hardly necessary to add, 
that this view of the artist's career is very 
remote from my own. The duty which the 
younger Hawthorne owes, far more impera- 
tively, to his father's memory, has been already 
suggested. Some of the deficiencies in the 
present essay may fairly be charged to its non- 
performance. There is a sense in which we 
may claim a right to know so much as can be 
told concerning the intellectual and artistic 
biography of our first great imaginative author. 

The Artist's Compensations 
Both among his shorter stories and in the 
great romances, Hawthorne's most notable suc- 
cesses are in the tales which have a New Eng- 



HAWTHORNE 97 

land setting. His interest in the life of his 
bigoted heroic Puritan ancestors was, however, 
only an artistic sympathy. His reaction from 
their unbending creed had left him little if any 
theological convictions. The intervening cen- 
turies have already softened somewhat to our 
view the rugged outlines of their life. A 
certain glamour of romance begins to fall 
athwart their homespun costumes, their harsh 
faces, their unimaginative utterance. At any 
rate, this New England life — past and pres- 
ent — was the only one the young romancer 
knew well, and he was aware that the creatures 
of his imagination, in order to be effectively 
human, required a certain frame and environ- 
ment of realism. The history and the land- 
scapes of our Eastern shore he had studied 
with an accuracy characteristic of the real 
artist. Nevertheless, the life-drama of Hester, 
of Hepzibah, of Zenobia, would be essentially 
the same, whatever the environment. And it is 
not as a historian, as an antiquarian, nor even 
as an artist of the picturesque, that Hawthorne 
attains the lonely heights of genius, but as an 
observer of the human heart. 



98 THE NEW ENGLAND TOETS 

In a poem, more or less self-revealing in tone, 
though not confessedly so, Emerson says : 

"Men consort in camp and town, 
But the poet dwells alone." 

Yet not one of our New England poets, 
indeed, no American author save Poe, gives 
us such an impression of utter solitariness on 
earth, as does shy, sensitive, wondrously gifted 
Hawthorne. Emerson himself was the centre 
of a loyal group whom we call his disciples, 
though he, like Socrates, would doubtless 
repudiate the title of Master. If he was him- 
self little dependent upon any living teacher, — 
though even here Carlyle and the elder Chan- 
ning might be accounted exceptions, — at least 
there is a large and congenial company, from 
Plato to Swedenborg, whose voices blend con- 
stantly with Emerson's printed or uttered word, 
and must have been almost always in his 
ears. 

But even the style of Hawthorne brings us 
hardly a reminiscence of his reading. Like 
everything else about him, it has but the deli- 
cate aroma of his personality. Nothing pre- 



HAWTHORNE 99 

cious in it was plainly copied, and very little 
can be borrowed from it after him by lesser 
hands. As we linger entranced over his pages, 
neither he nor we may remember the name or 
existence of other literary artists. We enter 
with him directly into the sanctuaries of the 
soul. 

This solitude was his fate on earth. Long- 
fellow was his college associate at Bowdoin. 
One would think that two such gentle and 
sensitive natures would surely discover each 
the other's rare gifts even then. But they 
confess later, with regret, that they were not 
drawn closely together in their college days. 
Many years after, Emerson lived near Haw- 
thorne in the quiet Concord street. They 
occasionally walked together, but Emerson ac- 
quired only a general optimistic faith that the 
man was ''healthier than his books," those 
books which the tolerant philosopher seems 
to have pronounced morbid on rather slight — 
and slighting — perusal ! 

I think the final judgment will reverse this 
Emersonian dictum, and say Hawthorne's way 
of life was a morbid one, or at least would 



lOO THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

tend to produce morbid men in most cases; 
but that its hermit-like seclusion and loneli- 
ness were destined, in this particular instance, 
to make possible the most unique and inimi- 
table masterpieces of creative prose that our 
race has yet to show. 

Agassiz compelled a young student of biol- 
ogy to concentrate all his thought, week after 
week, upon a single fish : and that fish finally 
taught him the true insight into science. 
Hawthorne's fate secluded him, year after 
year, to ponder the structure of the human 
soul, the problem of sin in the heart. It 
chanced — if chance there be in the dealings 
of destiny with us — that the pure spirit and 
delicately balanced moral nature of Hawthorne 
carried him triumphantly through this long 
period of solitary confinement, and enabled 
him to bring back to the world — not, indeed, 
a solution for the deepest mystery of Provi- 
dence, but — artistic studies toward that solu- 
tion which shall give consolation and pure 
delight to many a generation after ours. 

Not only in youth was Hawthorne, the 
romancer, a solitary soul. His happy and 



HAWTHORNE • lOl 

devoted wife, the children who shared in 
some degree the Hterary gift, lived in tender- 
est harmony with the man. They knew little 
more than we of the artist who sat silent at 
his desk, or paced the lonely hill path beneath 
his pines. It is doubtful whether Hawthorne 
himself could have rendered any intelligible 
account, even if he would, of the process 
through which the materials collected for the 
great romances acquired a spiritual unity, a 
soul, as it were, of their own. Herein, to 
be sure, he is nowise unique. Ask any man 
who ever shaped a perfect sonnet, a couplet, 
nay, an apophthegm five words long that drops 
a true plummet into the depths of life. The 
mystery is the same in kind, though not in 
degree. 

"These wonders grew as grows the grass." 

Exactly. How does the grass grow ? Very 
like the '* flower in the crannied wall ! " We 
never hear the answer, but only the echoed 
question. 

As Mr. Stedman makes clear, almost pain- 
fully clear, in his sympathetic study of Bayard 



I02 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

Taylor's career, the artist must often choose 
— or destiny chooses for him — between the 
fullest development and all-sided enjoyment 
of life among men, and the complete conse- 
cration of himself to that unique flower of 
genius which is implanted in his own soul. 
The latter choice is perhaps more apt to 
assure long-lasting fame. The single, nar- 
rower devotion to creative efforts builds (to 
change the metaphor) the loftier and more 
enduring monument. 

Lowell, with natural gifts almost or quite 
as unique, made, on the whole, the other 
choice. He never found even such half 
seclusion as he ridiculed in Thoreau. Conse- 
quently, Hosea Biglow's dialect poetry, the 
sympathetic studies of great poets, the slash- 
ing critical reviews, the editor's, the profes- 
sor's, the diplomatist's work, his frank letters, 
even the great memorial addresses and odes, 
are comparatively perishable assurances of 
Lowell's equipment for the one great task 
which he never essayed: whether epic, drama, 
or romance we shall not know. Too late, 
with divided energies and world-wide inter- 



HAWTHORNE 103 

ests, he attempted, e.g. in the " Cathedral," to 
reconsecrate himself to that highest art which 
demands single-hearted service. But few 
men, surely, will recall the first reading of 
this or any other poem of Lowell as an 
epoch in their lives. We may fancy we 
have outgrown "Hiawatha" or *' Evangeline," 
''Elaine" or even "In Memoriam." But im- 
agine any one of these utterly blotted out of 
Past as well as Present ! Would it not leave 
as real a gap as the death of an old friend .? 
Whittier, even, with no such rare genius as 
either Hawthorne or Lowell, after a lifetime 
of distraction and unpoetic ^ strife, has, after 
all, set one tenderly truthful picture — "Snow- 
bound" — in that little circle of ever-familiar 
scenes which are, as it were, the windows of 
our imagination. No one work of Lowell's, 
it seems to me, has gained, or can ever gain, 
quite this position in the average New Eng- 
lander's or American's memory. But, surely, 
the tragic group upon the scaffold at the close 
of the "Scarlet Letter," at least, has a place 
of honor among our indelible and universal 
remembrances. 



I04 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

We do not say Lowell either should have 
made, or could have made, in youth the 
same choice as Hawthorne. Indeed, Haw- 
thorne repined bitterly at what he called his 
own "cursed habits of solitude." But, at 
least, there is a Compensation, as Emerson 
uses the word, more complete, indeed, than 
the recluse in his loneliest hours is wont 
clearly to foresee. We may sometimes re- 
verse the emphasis in Goethe's famous coup- 
let : 

" A talent is in solitude developed, 
But in the stream of life a character," 



and read 



" In life's full stream a character develops ; 
— Only in solitude doth genius bloom." 



IV 
LONGFELLOW 

Longfellow's Youth 

The bust of Longfellow, set up in the 
Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey, was, I 
believe, the first memorial of any other than 
an Englishman ever admitted to that doubly 
sacred precinct. Perhaps the general feeling 
of approval at this act is itself among the 
singer's greatest triumphs. He, first of all 
Americans, has produced works equally and 
perfectly familiar in both lands, through 
both hemispheres. There lived in England, 
in his time, at least one greater literary artist, 
as Longfellow himself loyally declared in his 
sonnet "Wapentake": the Touching of the 
Shield. That challenge to Tennyson is, as he 
explains, no defiance, but 

"In sign 
Of homage to the mastery which is thine 

;lish 

105 



lo6 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

Others, like — let us say — Browning, have 
essayed more successfully, as Whittier ex- 
presses it, 

"To drop a plummet line below 
Our common world of joy and woe, 
A more intense delight or deeper grief to find " 

— if that be the true proof of greatness. But 
Longfellow has uttered the sincerest and purest 
feelings of the uncounted millions, all around 
the globe, that use our English speech. Some, 
ay many, of his best-beloved lyrics seem des- 
tined to live, for wider helpfulness in the 
teeming future, 

" As long as the heart has passions, 
As long as life has woes." 

This, alone, would be a blessed earthly lot for 
any man. But it is not all. The life of Long- 
fellow was, itself, a noble work of art : perhaps 
as encouraging and inspiring as any our young 
civilization has yet to show. From that life, 
and from his poetic work as well, there are 
precious lessons to be drawn, not merely for 
the humble heart everywhere, 

"That hopes, and endures, and is patient," 



LONGFELLOW 107 

but for the aspiring soul, for the ambitious 
artist, for the wise and strong among mankind. 
It is above all a story of untiring preparation 
and triumphant fulfilment of a sacred mission. 
We need not fear to call attention, once again, 
to the moral, the ethical tone, which all our 
Puritan poets strike in harmony. And the 
especial lesson of Longfellow's beautiful life 
is perhaps that expressed in one of the poems 
often called, half-jestingly, his "psalms" (though, 
indeed, he himself freely uses that title for them 
in his diary) : 

" We have not wings, we cannot soar ; 
But we have feet to scale and climb 
By slow degrees, by more and more, 
The cloudy summits of our tmie. 

" The heights by great men gained and kept 
Were not attained by sudden ilight, 
But they, while their companions slept, 
Were toiling upward in the night." 

Not that any lifelong exertion would have pro- 
duced among us other Longfellows. Let us be 
thankful for each great creative artist as a dis- 
tinct miracle wrought for us all. But the 
divine spark entrusted to him was fed to a 



io8 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

clear, ever-brightening flame by unbroken years 
of generous devotion, of arduous study, of un- 
remitting effort. Such consecration to our 
highest possibilities is in itself the truest 
success. 

"No endeavor is in vain : 

The reward is in the doing, 
And the rapture of pursuing 
Is the prize the vanquished gain ! " 

The great triumphs of Longfellow's maturity 
are familiar to all. All our hearts have 
throbbed to the music of his ** Psalm of Life." 
To every man's youth the cry of Excelsior has 
echoed far up the heights, even if the voice no 
longer falls on our memory like a falling star. 
It is especially, therefore, to the scholarly side 
of Longfellow's life, and to his thorough prepa- 
ration, that I would call attention here. 

How much we all owe to a pious, thoughtful 
ancestry can never be fully determined. Even 
among the half-dozen kindred spirits popularly 
grouped as the New England poets, the youth- 
ful Longfellow seems remarkable for natural 
gentleness and innocence, for an instinctive 



LONGFELLOW I09 

choice of things pure and noble, for innate re- 
finement and scholarly tastes. 

His seventeenth-century ancestors dwelt, like 
the Whittiers, and also the Lowells, in the 
Merrimac valley, at Newbury. His great- 
grandfather, Stephen Longfellow, a Harvard 
graduate, was called to Portland, as a teacher, 
in 1744. A second Stephen was state senator, 
judge, etc., and a third, the poet's father, was 
again a Harvard graduate, an active lawyer, a 
congressman while Henry was studying at 
Bowdoin, later president of the Maine His- 
torical Society, and a universally respected 
citizen of Portland. Longfellow's earliest as- 
sociations were evidently more favorable to 
literary culture than those of Whittier, or even 
of Hawthorne. 

Of his native city, Portland, we have loving 
glimpses, especially in " My Lost Youth," 
where he sighs : 

" Often I think of the beautiful town 
That is seated by the sea " ; 

but there is nowhere a trace of the irritation 
and disappointed pride that mingle with Haw- 



no THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

thorne's half -tender, half-satirical memories of 
Salem. 

It may be due to his birth in sight of the 
Atlantic waves, that Longfellow — though oth- 
erwise not a close student of outward nature, 
one, indeed, who was more at home even from 
boyhood in a library than in the woods and 
fields — yet constantly recurs wistfully to the 
"Secret of the Sea." The poems which bring, 
the first unmistakable announcement that a 
vigorous creative artist has come, are the 
" Skeleton in Armor" and "The Wreck of the 
Hesperus," both distinctively sea poems. Indeed, 
if we were to cull with care from the goodly 
Corpus of his verse all those poetical figures 
which he had drawn, not from the suggestions 
of earlier authors, but from his own observa- 
tion in the open air, we should surely find 
that a very large proportion of them had to do 
with the 

" Beauty and mystery of the ships, 
And the magic of the sea." 

Thus in " Miles Standish " the most vivid and 
fitting image is in the march of the angry little 



LONGFELLOW ill 

captain and his troop up the coast, in the gray 
of the dawn, while 

" Under them loud on the sands the serried billows ad- 
vancing, 
Fired along the line, and in regular order retreated." 

We may be sure these verses were composed 
to the thunderous accompaniment of the At- 
lantic billows themselves, upon the beloved 
shore of Nahant. 

Longfellow was only fourteen when he en- 
tered Bowdoin College, in the same class with 
his elder brother Stephen. The latter, by the 
way, was much nearer to Hawthorne in those 
years, though the two men of genius were upon 
friendly terms. The letters to his parents dur- 
ing his college life were amusingly sedate, 
bookish, — one is tempted to add, — priggish! 
There is one curious reminder, how different 
was the undergraduate of seventy years ago 
from the modern athletic type. " The govern- 
ment, seeing that something must be done to 
induce the students to exercise, recommended 
a game of ball now and then." And the con- 
text leaves the impression, that the result was 



112 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

an unwelcome draught upon the young scholar's 
literary leisure ! 

Even before he entered college, some verses 
of the boy rhymer had appeared in the Port- 
land papers. During his four years at Bowdoin 
he acquired a real, though somewhat slender, 
literary reputation. Seventeen of his poems ap- 
peared in the '* United States Literary Gazette " 
(Boston) alone. These undoubtedly showed 
more refinement and taste than ordinary under- 
graduate verses ; but they give little promise 
of originality and force, — unless, as a kindly 
editor wrote him at that time, " An exuberance 
of blossoms is a good promise for fruit." Bry- 
ant's influence is especially evident. In gen- 
eral, any work of this period would hardly have 
been preserved but for the writer's later fame. 
Only seven of the early poems, " all written 
before the age of nineteen," were included by 
Longfellow in his collected works. The "Burial 
of the Minnisink " (an Indian chief) is perhaps 
most interesting, especially as a prophecy of the 
poet's greatest popular success, ** Hiawatha." 

But it is far more significant, that, for nearly 
a dozen following years (1826 -1837), Long- 



LONGFELLOW 113 

fellow wrote no original poetry at all : he 
had discovered that he had as yet no message 
to men : no adequate knowledge of life. So 
Schiller said later of his youthful drama, " The 
Robbers " : "I attempted to draw men before 
I had known any." Longfellow was more 
timely wise. He produced no more immature 
verse. Instead, fee was devoting himself to an 
exhaustive study of modern languages and lit- 
eratures, which soon left him without a rival 
in America, save Ticknor, in his chosen field. 

In this happy turn of his life, fortune, or 
Providence, had a manifest share. Upon his 
graduation, his father hoped he would study 
law. So it was with Holmes, and with Lowell. 
His own heart was set on a post-graduate 
course in literature at Harvard. But Bowdoin 
had just decided to create a professorship of 
modern languages, and this was informally 
offered to the precocious youth, who at eighteen 
years of age had just graduated fourth in a 
class of thirty-eight. He was required first 
to spend a series of years in preparing himself 
abroad. 

So in April, 1826, he left home, to remain 



114 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

over three years in France, Spain, Italy, and 
Germany. He lived comfortably, often in re- 
fined native families in each country. His let- 
ters of introduction made him known to the 
best American society in Europe, e.g. the Irv- 
ings and Everetts in Spain. But he devoted 
himself indefatigably to the mastery of lan- 
guages and literatures. There can hardly be a 
severer test for youthful character than such a 
lonely student-life in foreign lands. Longfellow 
could have echoed young Milton's boastful cita- 
tion from Horace, *' Ccehmi non animum imito 
dum trans mare curro!' 

The next six years, 1829-183 5, Longfellow 
held the professorship at Bowdoin. In 183 1 he 
was happily wedded. His married home was 
a delightful old Brunswick house, shaded by 
gigantic elms. At least the ample mansion 
seemed venerable, and the elms were enormous 
in 1892, in which year the present writer was a 
Bowdoin professor, and, as it chanced, beheld 
one of these noble trees toppled over in a 
cyclone, and crushing in the roof of the historic 
abode ! 

The bibliography of his v/ork published dur- 



LONGFELLOW 115 

ing this period will surprise those who know 
him only as a popular poet. It shows that, 
besides faithful service in the teacher's chair, 
he was completing his systematic study of the 
chief languages and literatures of Europe. For 
practical instruction he wrote an Italian gram- 
mar in French, adapted an elementary French 
grammar, and edited French, Spanish, and 
Italian books for reading. 

He printed six important essays in the old 
'* North American Review " — that solid reposi- 
tory of general scholarship which we sadly miss. 
Longfellow's papers on the origin and history 
of the French, Italian, and Spanish languages 
are partly philological, though illuminated by 
literary taste. " Old English Romances " and 
a later paper on Anglo-Saxon literature (1838) 
show that his own direct poetic ancestry was 
not omitted from the cycle of his studies. 
''Spanish Devotional and Moral Poetry" gives 
more scope to his masterly skill in metrical 
translation. Especially, a number of sonnets 
are here exquisitely rendered. 

It seems important to call due attention to 
this long and laborious apprenticeship, served 



Ii6 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

by our most popular poet. Simplicity is of two 
kinds, and is attained by two very different 
paths. Will Carleton's " Betsey and I are out " 
and ''The Birds of Killingworth " are equally 
easy reading. Both appeal effectively to the 
elemental instincts of humanity. One has the 
crude and homely simplicity of natural feeling, 
the other the crystalline perfection, in form and 
expression, that marks consummate art. That 
is a perfectly healthful and natural interest 
which the first glance at a Rogers statuette 
arouses, and usually satisfies. But we can draw 
a much higher enjoyment from the Hermes 
of Praxiteles and the Melian Aphrodite. My. 
present point is, that between " The Burial of 
the Minnisink" and " The Skeleton in Armor " ;" 
lay a dozen years of just such study of form in ^ 
the works of the earlier masters as a precocious 
young composer gains by steadfast devotion 
to Mozart and Beethoven, or a clever natural 
artist by "drawing from the antique." 

Especial interest attaches to the essay, " De- 
fence of Poetry," published in the "North Amer- 
ican," January, 1832. Beginning in traditional 
reviewers' fashion with a notice of Sir Philip 



LONGFELLOW 1 1 7 

Sidney's ''Defence of Poesy" (then just re- 
printed), this is really the frankly uttered 
Credo of a patriotic, ambitious young American, 
upon the threshold of our Golden Age of let- 
ters — in which he is himself to be the central 
figure. It should be studied side by side with 
Emerson's oration, " The American Scholar," 
which was not delivered until 1837. ^^^ the 
real sunrise of our national literature had come, 
ten years before Longfellow, wrote this paper, 
with the appearance, almost simultaneously, of 
Cooper's " Spy," Irving's ''Sketch Book," and 
Bryant's first volume of poems, including " The 
Ages," "To a Waterfowl," and "Thanatopsis." 
Mr. Longfellow's resolute abstention in later 
years from anything like literary criticism 
justifies me in calling more carefully to others' 
attention this early and little-read study. As 
has happened constantly in all ages, the poet- 
philosopher finds his generation an all too 
sordid and practical folk. " We are swallowed 
up," he says, "in schemes for gain, and 
engrossed with contrivances for bodily enjoy- 
ment." So we are, still ! We have ourselves 
echoed this familiar cry. " The true glory of 



Il8 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

a nation is moral and intellectual preemi- 
nence," he cries, with all the zeal of fresh 
discovery. That sentence may have suggested 
the title for the great Fourth of July speech 
against war, called ''The True Grandeur of 
Nations," delivered thirteen years later by 
Longfellow's beloved friend, Charles Sumner. 
The practical utility of the fine arts is insisted 
on, in words that glow with color. " Does 
not the pen of the historian perpetuate the 
fame of the hero and the statesman .? Do not 
their names live in the song of the bard ? . . . 
Does not the spirit of the patriot and the 
sage, looking from the painted canvas or elo- 
quent from the marble lip, fill our hearts 
with veneration for all that is great in intel- 
lect and godlike in virtue ? " Truly this is no 
shrill cry of "Art for Art's Sake," whatever 
that shibboleth may mean. At any rate, with 
Longfellow we are still safe in the happy 
days ''when Art was still Religion!" 

The creative Artist, he insists, must be true 
to nature, though he cannot be merely true 
to fact, — a profoundly important distinction. 
No woman, as he indicates, was ever so per- 



LONGFELLOW 119 

feet as to be the sole model for the Venus 
de' Medici. So his Evangeline is *' false to 
fact," if you like. She never existed, nor 
did Elaine ! But both are loftily true to ideal 
womanhood. 

Poetry, Longfellow reminds us, is older 
than our earliest traditions. He believes, ap- 
parently, in a peaceful pastoral Age of Gold, 
before the wars began that furnished mate- 
rials for Iliads and Nibelungenlieds. In those 
happy days Imagination awoke in man, shap- 
ing the nymph for the gushing fountain, giv- 
ing a personal life to grove and sea billow, 
creating a goddess, to thank her for the boun- 
teous harvests as her creation. So poesy 
began. 

And poetry is thus the eternal mirror of 
man's inner feelings and outward life. Hence 
it is also the most authentic material for history, 
since " historic facts are chiefly valuable as 
exhibiting intellectual phenomena." Indeed, 
a great poem, like the " Iliad," the *' Nibe- 
lungen," the " Poema del Cid," or the songs 
of the Troubadours, may often be essentially 
our only memorial from a phase of human 



I20 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

life and thought which has forever passed 
away. Poetry and pottery are the two records 
of man's existence which are essentially inde- 
structible. From the dust of Hissarlik we 
have gathered shards of the lacrimatory urn 
which received Andromache's tears for Hec- 
tor : at least, no one can ever disprove our 
fond belief; but in the "Iliad" the tears them- 
selves flow ever afresh, and ours with them. 

Poetry, he continues, should be truly na- 
tional. Thus the so-called '' pastoral " verse 
is mostly affectation in our climate. Wal- 
pole's witty remark is quoted with approval. 
" Our poets learnt their trade of the Romans, 
and so adopted the terms of their masters. 
They talk of shady groves, purling streams, 
and cooling breezes, — and we get sore throats 
and agues in attempting to realize these 
visions." 

" We wish our - native poets would give a 
more national character to their writings. This 
is peculiarly true in descriptions of natural 
scenery. . . . Let us have no more skylarks 
and nightingales." Longfellow is here writ- 
ing the epitaph for his own boyish verses 



LONGFELLOW 121 

with the rest. Indeed, ''the precocity of our 
writers " is deplored with unmistakable empha- 
sis in this paper. In his "Angler's Song," 

" Upward speeds the morning lark 
To its silver cloud," 

(1826), and the mock-nightingale's falsetto also 
could very likely be discovered, by careful 
search, among these youthful strains. Nor did 
he fully take to heart his own warning, even 
now. Long after, when the Prelude to " Voices 
of the Night " had appeared, Margaret Fuller 
reminded him sharply that New Englanders 
kept no record of Pentecost, and neither knew 
nor cared whether 

" Bishops' caps have golden rings." 

The more important lesson with which Long- 
fellow returned later to verse was that human- 
ity, not unconscious nature, is the centre of all 
rational interest. To quote again from the 
Prelude, the poet has heard the admonition 
of far-off voices, — perhaps the voices of the 
" dead poets, who are still living," whom he 
later apostrophizes in a noble sonnet : 



122 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

" Learn, that henceforth thy song shall be, 
Not mountains capped with snow. 
Nor forests sounding like the sea. 
Nor rivers flowing ceaselessly. . . . 

" Look, then, into thine heart, and write ! 
Yes, into life's deep stream ! " 

The essay we are discussing faces in the same 
direction. Though poetry is still praised as the 
fit companion for weary men's hours of idleness 
and of dreamy ease, its true office is a higher 
one — even the highest. . . . " There is some- 
thing immortal in us, something which amid the 
din of life urges us to aspire after the attributes 
of a more spiritual nature. Let the cares and 
business of the world sometimes sleep, for this 
sleep is the awakening of the soul." 

Longfellow's moral earnestness even leads 
him in this paper to what is rare indeed from 
his pen : the severest criticism of another poet. 
*' No writer has done half so much," he says, 
"to corrupt the literary taste, as well as the 
moral principles of our country, as the author 
of ' Childe Harold.' " In Wordsworth he finds 
a healthful antidote, but urges that the young 
writer '* should leave the present age and go 



LONGFELLOW 123 

back to the olden time. He should make, not 
the writings of an individual, but the whole body 
of English classical literature, his study." 

It is generally felt that such warnings con- 
cerning Byron are no longer needed. He is 
gone quite out of fashion. Indeed, it is rather 
a pity that '' Childe Harold," at least, is not 
studied more than it is. One quality in it, 
especially, a large stateliness of style, a free 
swift movement that finds the great Spenserean 
stanza not too ample, is almost unrivalled still. 
How many poets have ever attained such ma- 
jesty as Byron in the familiar lines, 

" There is a pleasure in the pathless wood," . . . 

or many another such strophe ? And as for 
the tendency to meditation — after Wordsworth's 
fashion — over inanimate nature, Bryant, Emer- 
son, Longfellow himself, and their disciples have 
brought quite enough of this to New England. 
Altogether, despite one or two bits of rhetori- 
cal and evidently rather delectable pessimism 
over "these practical days," wherein the divine 
stream of poesy has " spread itself into stagnant 
pools," the paper should have aroused bright 



124 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

anticipations of the approaching time, when 
this scholar-philosopher was himself to return 
to the task of creating poetry. 

In the year 1835, which closed his Brunswick 
experience, Longfellow published " Outre-Mer," 
a rather sentimental, loosely strung series of 
sketches from a traveller's notebook. The 
best of it suggests a comparison with Irving's 
" Sketch Book," which Longfellow has told us 
was the first work to influence him vitally, and 
which had appeared when the poet was an 
undergraduate at Bowdoin. " Outre-Mer " is in 
great part 

" Full of a young man's joy to be 
Abroad in the world, alone and free." 

It has several bright pictures of the ''lands 
beyond the sea." Normandy seen from the top 
of a diligence was almost a terra incognita then, 
the cemetery of Pere-la-Chaise, also, not too 
hackneyed a subject. (Florence and Rome, 
even then, were passed over as an all-too- 
familiar " traveller's tale.") But the little 
volume was largely pieced out — not to say 
padded — with chapters upon Devotional 



LONGFELLOW 12^ 

Poetry of Spain, Ancient Spanish Ballads, 
the Trouveres, etc., giving a strong flavor of 
bookishness to the whole. Longfellow is in- 
deed, above all else, a bookman : he usually 
sees art and nature best through other poets' 
rhymes, as he himself says in old age : 

" I turn the world round with my hands, 
Reading these poets' rhymes . . . 
And see when looking with their eyes, 
Better than with my own ! " 

Another period of travel and study, in prep- 
aration for the Harvard professorship, now 
intervened. These two years (April, 1835- 
October, 1836) were darkened by the death of 
Longfellow's young wife, which occurred in 
Holland, November, 1835. There is a brief 
allusion to her in ** Footsteps of Angels," as 



Who unto my youth was given, 

More than all things else to love me, 

And is now a saint in Heaven."" 

The next seven years, 1 836-1 843, until Long- 
fellow's second marriage, constitute the next 
period of his life, including his return to poetry. 



126 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

The verses called " Flowers " were actually the 
first written, being sent with some autumn 
blossoms to a friend in October, 1837. He 
had established himself the previous summer 
as a lodger in Craigie House, later to be 
his own, and so long associated inseparably 
with his life and his work. The full reawak- 
ening of his poet-nature came, however, a year 
later in the " Psalm of Life." The first poem 
is as finished as a Dutch miniature, showing 
unlimited pains in polishing, — and perhaps 
diligent use of a rhyming dictionary ! But it is 
as cold, as lifeless, and almost as scentless as a 
wreath of artificial blossoms. 

The " Psalm of Life " is far less polished and 
fluent. Rather it suggests a tumultuous eager- 
ness for expression. We, of course, can never 
read it as it was first read then, much less 
realize fully the spirit in which it was written. 
But the very crudeness of parts reveals the 
throb and heat behind it. 

And its lesson was more needed then. The 
"mournful numbers" against which it protests 
filled the air about him with their sickly senti- 
mentality. To us '* life is real, life is earnest," 



LONGFELLOW 127 

and the literary life, at least, in America is 
infinitely more real and earnest, because Long- 
fellow sang for almost half a century after 
those days. This very poem is in part another 
protest against the influence of Byron, which 
was then still supreme. Spiritually, the poem 
justifies the prompt and loud acclaim with 
which it was hailed. As to its form, we should 
wish (did not old association make it sacred 
just as it is) that Longfellow had thus early hit 
upon the measure, very near to this trochaic 
form outwardly, far above it in natural fitness 
and force: the measure in which many of his 
deepest personal feelings afterward took shape 
without effort. How near it lay ! The very 
words of the Psalm struggle against the trochaic 
lockstep : 

" For the soul is dead that shimbers, 

And things are not what they seem." . . . 

" In the world's broad field of battle, 
Iii the bivouac of life." 

And how triumphantly afterward, in " The 
Bridge" or ''The Day is Done," the verses 
escaped the fetters of an un-English rhythm : 



I2S THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

" As sweeping and eddying through them, 
Rose the belated tide, 
And streaming into the moonlight 
The seaweed floated wide." 

If we have set our quotation so that the poet's 
thoughts are Hkened to drifted seaweed, it is 
only what he has done with full elaboration 
elsewhere ! ** To the River Charles " shows 
what could be made of the trochees with more 
technical skill and less eager rush of thought : 
but artificial they, must always be, since they 
strive against the tide of our native speech. 

From this time the story is a brightening one 
for many a year. The romance " Hyperion," 
published in 1839, is a reminiscence especially 
of that last lonely year in Europe. But a 
future of hope softens its sadness. In Mary 
Ashburton is a delineation of Frances Apple- 
ton, whom the poet had met in 1837, in Swit- 
zerland, as a girl of nineteen, and whom he 
was to marry in 1843. Still, the incidents of 
" Hyperion," we must believe, are altogether 
fictitious. The book is the most important 
among Longfellow's prose works. '' Kavanagh," 
written ten years later, is a rather slight and 



LONGFELLOW 129 

pallid novelette, generously characterized by 
Emerson as "the best sketch we have seen in 
the direction of the American novel." Both 
tales demonstrate negatively and finally (though 
agreeably) that Longfellow's chief energies were 
rightly devoted to verse. 

** Voices of the Night" appeared later, in 
1839. I^ them there is still a cloying sweet- 
ness, a love of graceful form and melodious 
sound for their own sake, sufficient to recall 
the precocious versifier of undergraduate days. 
The very title is daintily chosen, and has 
dragged the closing verses of the Prelude away 
from its chief purport, namely, that Life is the 
sole worthy theme of the poet. 

"The Skeleton in Armor" and "The Wreck 
of the Hesperus " presently bring the full 
assurance that the graceful translator, and 
even the learned and persuasive Humanist, 
will be forgotten, since the poet's heart has 
found voice. The rest of Longfellow's literary 
life seems to follow as naturally as the unfold- 
ing, leaf by leaf, of the Victoria regia ! Here 
Longfellow's youth, his apprentice years, may 
be said to end : and how full those years were 



130 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

of toil, self-repression, and wise silences, is not 
even yet generally recognized in adequate 
degree. 

Longfellow's Maturity 

The entire life of Longfellow was directed, 
with remarkable consistency and singleness of 
purpose, to literary studies, out of which his 
own creative and imaginative work seemed to 
grow as naturally as the fruit ripens upon a 
firm-rooted tree. His perusal of literature was 
not critical, in any severely analytical and 
destructive sense, much less so than in Lowell's 
case. What he disapproved, he quietly avoided; 
at whatever springs he found vigor and en- 
couragement, he drank deep. Hence came, in 
part, his remarkable success as a translator. 

Though happy in love and friendship, and 
enjoying an ever-widening popularity, Mr. 
Longfellow shrank from anything like a public 
appearance. Even in the all-absorbing agita- 
tion against human slavery, this lifelong friend 
of Charles Sumner took part only in a single, 
almost accidental, series of poems, written on a 
lonely sea-voyage. To be sure, these ranged 



LONGFELLOW 131 

him unmistakably on humanity's side, and he 
was doubtless "fanatic named and fool " there- 
for, to quote a phrase Lowell uses of Wendell 
Phillips. Not very long afterward, however, 
the Abolitionists themselves were denouncing 
the gentle poet, when he yielded to his pub- 
lishers' desire, and omitted the " Poems on 
Slavery " from the collected edition of his 
works. Of his brother-poet Whittier's con- 
fessed taste for politics, he had not the slight- 
est share. Indeed, Whittier's proposal that he 
should stand as candidate for Congress was 
rejected with something very like terror. 

The poet's second marriage, in 1843, appears 
to have been an ideal one in every respect. 
Craigie House and the lands about it came to 
Longfellow as his wife's dower. Of the bridal 
journey we have a memorial in the poem, " The 
Arsenal at Springfield." It was the bride who 
noted the likeness of the shining musket-barrels 
on the walls to organ pipes, imagined how 
grim a melody Death would play upon them, 
and besought her poet to sing the glories of 
peace. For every such glimpse as this into the 
inner workshop of the artist we proffer our 



132 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

deepest thanks. That we owe more than this, 
a hundred-fold, to the poet's wife, we may be 
sure. Truly 

" Each man's chimney is his Golden Milestone ; 
Is the central point from which he measures 

Every distance 
Through the gateways of the world around him." 

And the happy glow of Longfellow's hearth- 
fire in Craigie House has helped him to make 
all the ways of this world brighter and plainer 
for humanity. There are, however, but few 
direct memorials of his own home-happiness 
among Longfellow's published poems. The 
" Children's Hour " is doubtless the best known. 
In one of his rare odes, called *'To a Child," 
are bright glimpses of the home, and allusions 
to the earlier time when it had been Washing- 
ton's headquarters. The child (1845) must have 
been the poet's eldest son Charles. 

Longfellow told William Winter that he 
wrote some verses for himself alone, too per- 
sonal and intimate for publication. This is an 
interesting assurance that the poetic utterance 
becomes, for the true poet, the natural and final 
expression of his inmost feelings. This was 



LONGFELLOW 133 

true especially, in his case, of a form peculiarly 
artificial, never likely to be widely popular, — 
the sonnet. 

Longfellow was the greatest master of this 
delicate structure who has appeared in America. 
Indeed, he seems to me one of the most perfect 
artists, as to form and finish, within the son- 
net's " narrow plot of ground " in all the his- 
tory of English letters. There is a fascination 
about this form of verse which cannot be de- 
scribed to those who have never felt it. I 
firmly believe there is an occult, but profound, 
relation between the close-woven octette and 
sextette on the one hand, and the natural scope 
and measure of an adequate poetic thought on 
the other : a relation not fathomed, if dreamed 
of, in our philosophy. The rise of the thought, 
the transition, yet without a break, at the ninth 
line is, perhaps, the final test as to the fitness of 
the idea for this mould. Longfellow seems to 
have found the sonnet a necessity to him, to 
enshrine, and so banish, a thought which 
haunted him : nor is he at all alone in this 
feeling. 

Thus, at the half-way house of life, he com- 



134 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

posed verses not meant for the world's eye, 
containing a confession of ambition baffled as 
yet. This sonnet was written in 1842, during 
a six months' stay at the Rhirieland water cure 
of Marienberg. The title is a reminiscence of 
the first line in the " Divine Comedy." 

Mezzo Cammin 

" Half of my life is gone, and I have let 

The years slip from me and have not fulfilled 

The aspirations of my youth, to build 
Some tower of song v^^ith lofty parapet. 
Not indolence, nor pleasure, nor the fret 

Of restless passions that would not be stilled, 

But sorrow, and a care that almost killed, 
Kept me from what I may accomplish yet. 

Though, half way up the hill, I see the Past 
Lying beneath me with its sounds and sights ; 

A city in the twilight dim and vast. 
With smoking roofs, soft bells, and gleaming lights, 

And hear above me on the autumnal blast 
The cataract of Death far thundering from the heights.'" 

There is no more natural utterance in all his 
verse than the poem beginning, 

" I said unto myself, ' If I were dead 
What would befall these children ? ' " 



LONGFELLOW 135 

But a still surer example of his recourse to 
the sonnet, purely as a release from haunting 
thoughts, is the utterance of his undying grief 
for the beautiful woman who had made his 
home so bright through eighteen years, and 
who was then eighteen years dead. This again 
was meant only for his own eye : and was 
found in his portfolio after his departure, 
though written in 1879 

" In the long, sleepless watches of the night 
A gentle face — the face of one long dead — 
Looks at me from the wall." 

In this sonnet only (''The Cross of Snow") 
does he allude to the terrible death of his wife : 

" Soul more white 
Never through martyrdom of fire was led 
To its repose." 

The allusion in " Footsteps of Angels " to 
the wife of his early youth was also written long 
after her death. The only poem which can be 
considered an utterance of living love is the 
sonnet "The Evening Star." 

In this same year of 1879 there is an entry in 
Longfellow's diary, showing hov\r little of the 



136 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

mystic there was in the man who once calls 
Emerson's lectures " all dreamery after all." " I 
was eighteen years old when I took my college 
degree; eighteen years afterward I was mar- 
ried for the second time ; I lived with my wife 
eighteen years, and it is eighteen years since she 
died. . . . And then ... I was eighteen years 
professor in the college here, and have published 
eighteen separate volumes of poems. This is 
curious ; the necromancers would make a good 
deal out of it: I cannot make anything at all." 

The tragic and awfully sudden loss of his wife, 
in July 1 86 1, made a gulf in Longfellow's life, 
which was never filled. Yet a thoughtful com- 
parison of e.g. the "Wayside Inn" with his 
earlier work will show, I think, that the man's suf- 
fering was the world's gain. His nature was so 
pure, so manly, so heroic, that the call to suffer 
and be strong only aroused the chords and har- 
monies of ever deeper sympathy with all who 
must learn the same bitter lesson. 

Nor is it generally felt in this case, — as is 
often said of Lowell, and sometimes of Whittier, 
— that the avocations of the man hampered or 
dwarfed the full development and fruitfulness of 



LONGFELLOW 137 

the poet. Rather, his work as a teacher stimu- 
lated his studies, and those studies reached the 
sources from which much of his best material was 
drawn. To be sure, after the great triumph won 
with ''Evangeline," in 1847, and the approach- 
ing completion of "Hiawatha," in 1855, he felt 
justified in devoting the rest of life wholly to crea- 
tive work ; and in the latter year was succeeded 
in his college chair by the beloved brother-poet 
Lowell. But the ''Saga of King Olaf," e.g. 
we owe to the Scandinavian scholar as clearly 
as to the Puritan singer. Indeed, of all the 

" Tales those merry guests 
Told to each other " 

in the Wayside Inn, only one, the " Birds of Kill- 
ingworth," was absolutely original. How far 
Longfellow was from regretting or apologizing 
for such dependence, we see from his allusion 
to Shakspeare's similar relation to the "De- 
cameron " and its rivals : 

" Nor were it grateful to forget 
That from these reservoirs and tanks 
Even imperial Shakspeare drew 
His Moor of Venice and the Jew, 



138 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

And Romeo and Juliet, 

And many a famous comedy." 

This is said in the interlude of sharp discus- 
sion that follows the delightful transfusion (or 
indeed transfiguration) of Ser Federigo and his 
falcon. 

And yet Longfellow was indeed a creative 
artist, whose soul was greater than, was truly 
master of, all the materials it drew from world- 
wide wanderings. Any one who doubts it 
should turn to such a page as that which 
holds the last tribute to Hawthorne. Here is 
no single glance away from the village of Con- 
cord, save one at the most familiar of all our. 
nursery tales, " The unfinished window in ' 
Aladdin's tower." Yet the artist and the man' 
is nowhere more fully present. Nowhere in lit- 
erature do I find a better metaphor from out- 
ward nature than in the brief line : 

" The hill-top hearsed with pines." 

It is true, however, that Longfellow, though 
a master-artist, was not a great original thinker. 
But while this is to be largely conceded, it has 
often been greatly overstated. Even if Long- 



LONGFELLOW 139 

fellow had been a mere translator, our debt to 
him would still be great. There are many 
warm lovers of Uhland, who take even more 
delight in the " Luck of Edenhall " than in 
" Das Gliick von Edenhall." In some minor 
lyrics it is certainly true that Longfellow's ver- 
sions more than replace their originals. As an 
interpreter of foreign literatures and races he 
has broadened our national culture and habits 
of thought more, perhaps, than any other one 
man. His great version of Dante is but a par- 
tial success, for it assays the unattainable. The 
poetic charm of the great mediaeval singer is 
lost, but at least his every thought is rendered 
intelligible ; and Dante was the master-mind, as 
well as the master-poet, of his age. But the 
" Saga of King Olaf," or the miracle-play in the 
" Golden Legend," could only have been cre- 
ated by a true scholar, who had taken up into 
himself the spirit of a whole literature, of a 
whole epoch, and who was also a creative artist, 
able to give that spirit a freshly fashioned and 
beautiful form. In " Hiawatha," indeed, all the 
Indian lore of Schoolcraft and the rest was but 
mere unwrought clay for the potter. Here, 



140 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

almost everything is due to him who first gave 
it poetic beauty and spiritual meaning. 

And, though we omit from view every 
poem, great and little, which even seems to 
gain a suggestion from an alien source, there 
still remains a Longfellow, dear to all our 
hearts, who interprets to us, in words grown as 
familiar as the prayer of childhood, merely the 
truest voices of our own souls. Such utter- 
ances are "The Children's Hour," "Weariness," 
" Golden Milestone," " Resignation," " The 
Bridge," "The Rainy Day," and a hundred 
more. For every New Englander, at least, 
Longfellow's poetry is literally what Shelley 
said of Keats' : 

" He is made one with nature. There is heard 
His voice in all her music." 

The diary of Longfellow has already been 
repeatedly quoted. . It is usually very brief and 
meagre in form. He once intimates that the 
fear of future publicity restrains him from en- 
tering in it any hint of his inner life : and 
even of his external existence it is a very incom- 
plete chronicle, as he there remarks. This 



LONGFELLOW 141 

journal was excellently edited by the poet's 
brother Samuel, who also supplemented it help- 
fully from the letters placed at his disposal. 
But we learn little, disappointingly little, on the 
whole, in regard to the poet's artistic processes. 
I remember his telling me, in the only per- 
sonal talk I ever had with him, that he filed 
and polished a poem, soon after it was first 
composed, until he had perfected it to the ex- 
tent of his powers ; but rarely touched it again : 
certainly not after publishing it. He said he 
realized that the readers of a poem acquired 
a right to the poet's work in the form they had 
learned to love. Moreover, he had felt that 
Bryant and Whittier hardly seemed happy in 
these belated revisions. He mentioned espe- 
cially Bryant's " Waterfowl," 

"As darkly limned upon the ethereal sky." . . . 

He himself preferred the original reading 
** painted on." It must be conceded that there 
are weighty examples, like Tennyson, upon the 
opposite side. Still, it is oftener true, that the 
artist himself becomes another man, and should 
let the work of his earlier self stand, faulty 



142 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

though it must seem to him. Schiller felt this, 
and expressed it strongly, in regard to his 
" Don Carlos." 

It is a general and no doubt correct impres- 
sion, that most of Longfellow's lyrical work 
was done with ease, and required little revision. 

" As come the white sails of ships, 
O'er the ocean's verge ; 
As comes the smile to the lips, 

The foam to the surge, — 
So come to the poet his songs." . . . 

To this there are, of course, exceptions ; but 
e.g. the "Arrow and the Song" darted into his 
mind as instantaneously as the shaft itself 
pierces the heart of an oak. Another illustra- 
tion is especially instructive : the more as it 
marks an important stage in his progress. 

In the journal, under December 17, 1839, we 
read of the shipwrecks reported in the papers, 
and of bodies washed ashore, "one lashed to 
a piece of the wreck. There is a reef called 
Norman's Woe " (where many wrecks occurred) 
. . . "among others the schooner 'Hesperus.' 
... I must write a ballad on this ; also two 
others, — * The Skeleton in Armor ' and ' Sir 



LONGFELLOW 143 

Humphrey Gilbert.' " We see that the news 
of the day has drawn the poet's thoughts to 
the mysterious terrors of the deep. The most 
vivid and painful subject of the three lies crys- 
tallizing in the author's mind for a fortnight. 
Then (December 30), " Last evening ... I sat 
till twelve o'clock by my fire, smoking, when 
suddenly it came into my mind to write the 
'Ballad of the Schooner Hesperus,' which I 
accordingly did. Then I went to bed, but could 
not sleep. New thoughts were running in my 
mind, and I got up to add them to the ballad. 
It was three by the clock. I then went to bed 
and fell asleep. I feel pleased with the ballad. 
It hardly cost me an effort. It did not come 
into my mind by lines, but by stanzas." Janu- 
ary 2d (three days later), a fair copy is made, 
doubtless with some filing and polishing also 
of the details. The evening of the 4th Haw- 
thorne, then in the Boston custom house, drop- 
ping in, hears it with delight, and says he will 
give it to the skipper of every craft he boards 
in Boston harbor. (Yet it must be said the 
poem was hardly one to cheer the sea-bound 
mariners upon our bleak coast !) All this dis- 



144 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

tinctly aids us to the enjoyment of the verses. 
And poets of our day will find an enjoyment 
(less unalloyed) in the appended letter of Janu- 
ary /th, from a publisher, enclosing twenty-five 
dollars for the poem, and promising its appear- 
ance " next Saturday." 

*'My Lost Youth" *' came to me" in the 
night after a day lost in physical pain, and was 
written next morning (March 30, 1855). 

Longfellow was by no means content to live 
as a lyric poet and sonneteer. We quoted just 
now the sonnet written by the poet on his 
thirty-fifth birthday, at Marienberg. The 

" Tower of song with lofty parapet," 

which it was his life's highest ambition to raise, 
was even then beginning to shape itself in his 
mind. In his notebook appears : 

" Christus, a dramatic poem in three parts : 

Part L The Times of Christ. (Hope.) 
Part n. The Middle Ages. (Faith.) 
Part in. The Present. (Charity.)" 

This plan he succeeded in executing. The 
central portion, the " Golden Legend," ap- 



LONGFELLOW 145 

peared in 185 1, the "New England Trage- 
dies" in 1868, the ''Divine Tragedy" in 1871. 
The next year " Christus, a Mystery," con- 
tained the Prelude, Interludes, and Epilogue 
which complete the work. 

But it is not generally accepted in its en- 
tirety, by critics or by the general voice, as 
his masterpiece. The " Golden Legend," to 
be sure, combines all Longfellow's highest 
powers, including his mellow, thoughtful schol- 
arship, more adequately than any other single 
work. The " Divine Tragedy " does not seem 
to most of us a proper subject for poetic re- 
casting : and, indeed, Longfellow's reverence 
for the very words of the gospels has ham- 
pered his artistic freedom very seriously. I 
for one would sacrifice it more readily than 
any other large work of Longfellow, As for 
the two tragic episodes in early New England 
life, the witchcraft delusion and the perse- 
cution of the Quakers, they are eminently 
fitted for dramatic treatment. But Longfel- 
low's two plays — like the rest of ''Christus" 
— were unsuited for success on the stage, of 
which indeed he had little practical know- 



146 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

ledge. Nor are they especially typical or 
illustrative, in any adequate sense, of modern 
Christianity. Finally, Longfellow is entering 
in these '* tragedies " a field especially associ- 
ated with Hawthorne's genius; and despite 
the wide diversity of forms, his inferior dra- 
matic power is made quite evident. He had 
himself serious misgivings as to " Christus " 
as a whole, and published the " Divine Trag- 
edy," especially, with little confidence of suc- 
cess. 

Upon the whole, the subject attempted in 
this great trilogy seems too large to be treated 
within any one frame; much larger, even, than 
the Promethean myth : and there was nothing 
of the Titan in Longfellow's nature. The 
same craving for some monumental accom- 
plishment continued to haunt the poet still. 
There is a close parallelism here between the 
latter years of the greatest English poet of 
the Victorian Age and our own best-beloved 
singer. And especially persistent was Long- 
fellow's desire to shape an effective drama. 
In ** Michael Angelo," which he was inclined 
to keep long upon his working table, as a con- 



LONGFELLOW 147 

genial companion of his own old age, we heai 
through the weary sculptor's lips the poet 
sighing still of 

" The fever to accomplish some great work, 
That will not let us sleep. I must go on until I die." 

The fact is self-evident that no dramatic 
masterpiece has ever been produced on Ameri- 
can soil. The " Masque of Pandora," I fancy, 
was never seriously so intended. It is hardly 
more than a thread just strong enough to 
hold together the series of lyrics for which 
it exists : upon which, at least, it must rest its 
hopes of even partial survival. From "Judas 
Maccabaeus" there remains in the memory only 
that pathetic figure, the mother of the seven 
murdered heroes. The " Spanish Student," 
though not by any means drawn from the ut- 
most depths of the Puritan poet's nature, is a 
charming idyll of youth and romance. Well 
may the poet exclaim, in later years : 

"How much of my young heart, O Spain, 
Went out to thee in days of yore! " 

It has never been successfully acted, I be- 
lieve, but surely Preciosa could be made an 



148 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

effective part, especially for an actress who 
could dance the Cachuca before the cardinal ! 
^ And as our best-beloved poet has here made 
the nearest approach to a success in dramatic 
form yet achieved in New England literature, 
so " Evangeline " and '' Hiawatha " are the 
noblest substitutes we can offer for the great 
American epic that shall be. They do not, in- 
deed, like the " IHad " or the ''^neid," embody 
the triumphant activity of the singer's own 
race. They do express perfectly our elegiac 
sympathy for the Anglo-Saxon's vanquished 
foemen. Of all Longfellow's works, " Hia- 
watha " is the one wherein the time, the man, 
and the material united most happily to the 
creation of a work which else could never have 
been, and which the world could ill spare. For 
the sufferings of the Jews, for Medisevalism, 
for New England witchcraft, for Pandora's 
youth or Angelo's age, even, perhaps, for 
Evangeline's pathetic life-story, other poets 
equally effective might arise hereafter. Some 
of these themes, indeed, are not finally as- 
sured as Longfellow's own. But nearly every 
one, I think, feels that the romance of the 



LONGFELLOW 149 

American Indian has here been crystallized 
perfectly once for all, and for all time. The 
theme has even led the poet farther into the 
heart of the woods than he would else have 
found his way. Hiawatha's hunting, wooing, 
canoe-building, have the true fragrance of the 
aboriginal forest. 

Longfellow's poetical work includes experi- 
ments in nearly every familiar English metre, 
as well as in some forms peculiarly his own. 
For continuous narrative he often uses the 
four-accent iambic line most familiar from 
Scott's '' Lady of the Lake " : 

" The stag at eve| had drunk his fill, 
Where danced Ithe moori on Monan's rill." 

But he makes the sequence of rhymes so 
varied, that no tendency to couplet or other 
stanza is usually felt. He can also vary its 
speed greatly by the freer introduction of 
extra syllables. Thus the Prelude and Inter- 
ludes of the " Wayside Inn " were given a 
calm, equable flow, wherein 

"A pleasant murmur smote the ear, 
Like water rushing through a weir." 



150 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

But we all feel it is with nimbler feet that 

" Baron Castine of St. Castine 
Has left his chateau in the Pyrenees," 

and the pace quickened to a long, hard gallop 

as 

" Through the night rode Paul Revere : 

And through the niglit went his cry of alarm 

To every Middlesex village and farm." 

The slower more regular form of this metre 
Whittier has borrowed for ** Snowbound," which 
appeared a year or two after the first part of 
the "Wayside Inn." 

The tensyllable heroic couplet, so familiar in 
elder English verse, Longfellow uses rather 
after the fashion of Goldsmith, or Chaucer, 
than of Pope, not clashing each pair of verses 
like cymbals, but "running on" often from one 
couplet to the next. This metre is a still 
greater favorite with Holmes ; but no example 
since the " Deserted Village " seems to me 
more melodious than " Lady Wentworth " and 
"King Robert of Sicily." We may perhaps set 
here a brief passage from the latter poem, as a 
type of the easy flow and the noble simplicity 
in Longfellow's most finished masterpieces : 



LONGFELLOW 151 

" And when the angel met him on his way, 
And half in earnest, half in jest, would say, 
Sternly, though tenderly, that he might feel 
The velvet scabbard held a sword of steel, 
' Art thou the King? ' the passion of his woe 
Burst from him in resistless overflow, 
And, lifting high his forehead, he would fling 
The haughty answer back, ' 1 am, I am the King!'" 

The extra foot in the last line of this, and 
two other stanzas, is an example of Longfellow's 
accurate feeling for rhythm. Holmes has dis- 
cussed a more delicate illustration thereof, in 
the elder poet's Prelude, namely, the regular 
omission of a syllable in the fifth line of each 
sextette. The noble poem, " King Robert of 
Sicily," has a singular interest in connection 
with what was perhaps the most remarkable 
of the poet's many friendships. Dom Pedro 
had a high regard for Longfellow, both as 
man and minstrel. And among the numerous 
translations is recorded a version of this poem 
in Portuguese, by the blameless Brazilian 
monarch, who was thrust from his own throne 
at last, — though not by an angel, — no less 
suddenly and more tragically than the Sicilian 
tyrant. 



152 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

The English hexameter was to Longfellow a 
subject of lifelong interest and study. Besides 
" Evangeline " and " Miles Standish," there is also 
a sustained experiment in " Elizabeth" (a Quaker 
replica of Priscilla), a Tale of the Wayside Inn. 
A half line therefrom has been recently lifted 
into notice as the title of " Ships that Pass in 
the Night." Besides a few minor original poems, 
some translations in this metre were printed in 
the poet's lifetime, notably an Eclogue of Virgil, 
and several of Ovid's Tristia, the latter in elegiac 
verses. The half-dozen opening lines of the 
" Iliad," found in the diary, should hardly have 
been published. They are evidently a casual 
experiment, wisely abandoned as a failure. Upon 
the whole, Longfellow has not written as musi- 
cal hexameters as, for instance, Kingsley or 
Clough. He seems to me too bold in his disre- 
gard of the principle of quantity, which remains 
in English as a dangerous stumbling-block, at 
least. 

Iambic blank verse, it is generally conceded, 
becomes in Longfellow's hands, e.o-. in the ** Di- 
vine Tragedy," a rather rugged sort of prose. 
The only great and unquestioned success, in- 



LONGFELLOW i53 

deed, which he scored while free from those 
fetters of rhyme which he made an ornament 
and a glory, is the simple, unforced trochaic cra- 
dle swing of Hiawatha. This metre, as is well 
known, was suggested to him from the Finnish 
Epic of Kalewala ; but it was practically un- 
known in English. So the form, as well as the 
material, of Hiawatha, makes it the greatest 
original gift of Longfellow to our literature. 
There are many single lines which, standing 
alone, would never suggest the movement, nor 
indeed, seem like verse at all : 

" As he drew it in it tugged so 
That the birch canoe stood endwise 
Like a birch log in the water." 

But the genial easy flow carries along even the 
heaviest logs of prose. 

This beneficent life was prolonged fifteen 
years beyond that of Hawthorne. All the great 
tasks which Mr. Longfellow set himself were 
completed, save the dramatic poem of '' Michael 
Angelo," which he apparently did not desire to 
lay aside. He suffered no such decay of mem- 
ory and loss of the power of expression as 



154 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

Emerson. The wish so beautifully indicated 
in " Morituri Salutamus," and still more clearly 
in the motto taken from Horace for "Ultima 
Thule," was granted to the full, *' With mind 
unbroken," he passed "his age not lacking 
honor nor the lyre." The gift of song re- 
mained to the last. When "Ultima Thule" ap- 
peared in 1880, Lowell wrote his friend, " Never 
was your hand firmer." The beautiful and 
pathetic sonnet of December, 1881, "To My 
Books," is still proof of mastery over the most 
exacting of poetic forms. The last friend to 
see him in health was Luigi Monti, the " young. 
Italian," of the "Wayside Inn." This was on 
Saturday, March 18, 1882. That night he be- 
came suddenly ill, and lingered less than a 
week. On March 1 5 he had written these, his 
last, tenderly prophetic verses : 

" Out of the shadow of night 
The world rolls into light ; 
It is daybreak everywhere." 



V 

WHITTIER 

The Quaker Laureate of Puritanism 

It is impossible for a New Englander, 
whose memories go back to the Civil War 
and beyond, to assume the attitude of the 
cold literary critic at the mention of John 
Greenleaf Whittier's name. A poet born he 
certainly was, but even his poetic activity was, 
almost from the beginning, drawn into the 
full current of that strife against slavery to 
which he so early and completely devoted 
himself. Unless some anthology of our bu- 
colic poetry shall chance to outlive for centu- 
ries all the records of that gigantic struggle, 
Whittier will be remembered even more as 
the trumpet-voice of Emancipation, than as 
the peaceful singer of rural New England. 
Indeed, until near his sixtieth year, — when 
the result so long sought by peaceful means 
155 



156 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

came in the swift whirlwind of war, — he had 
regarded all hours spent on lighter themes 
than human freedom as mere self-indulgent 
diversion. 

"The great eventful Present hides the Past; but through 

the din 
Of its loud life, hints and echoes from the life behind 

steal in ; 
And the love of home and fireside, and the legendary 

rhyme, 
Makes the task of duty lighter which the true man owes 

his time." (" Garrison of Cape Ann.") 

The " Proem," in particular, marks this de- 
votion of Whittier's life to a moral cause : 

" O Freedom! If to me belong 

Nor mighty Milton's gift divine, 

Nor Marvell's wit and graceful song, 
Still with a love as deep and strong 

As theirs, I lay, like them, my best gifts on thy shrine ! " 

And certainly, the Quaker poet of New 
England had little leisure to polish most of 
these early offerings laid on Freedom's altar. 
Often, he says, "They were written with no 
expectation that they would survive the occa- 
sions which . called them forth : They were 



WHITTIER 157 

protests, alarm signals, trumpet-calls to action, 
words wrung from the writer's heart, and, of 
course, lacking the finish and careful word- 
selection which reflection and patient brood- 
ing over them might have given. Such as they 
are, they belong to the history of the Anti- 
slavery movement, and may serve as way- 
marks of its progress. 

Some well-known blemishes on Whittier's 
verses may often be charged to this headlong 
haste and fury in composition and publication. 
A few finished lyrics — notably the "Proem" 
itself, "Ichabod," the closing hymn in the 
"Tent 'orr"~th:e~ Beach" — indicate that peace- 
ful leisure, a wider culture, more deliberate 
habits of composition, would, perhaps, have 
enabled him to produce more faultless verses. 

But it is the general feeling, that few men 
have had a life better fitted, upon the whole, 
to reveal and perfect all their highest and 
rarest gifts. He was not, as he once calls 
himself, merely " A dreamer born, " though 
the power to dream sweetly was, indeed, part 
of his intellectual outfit. Yet his keen, lus- 
trous eyes were as evidently and inevitably 



158 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

wide awake from his very childhood, to the 
efforts for civic and social improvement, — 
which for true New Englanders is the very 
inmost essence of real living, — as were those 
of his deeper-toned kinsman, the defender of 
the constitution. To the serious business of 
political life, I say, Whittier's own impulses 
led as inevitably as Webster's. 

Even the voices of strife and violence were 
sweet in his ears, as the bugle to the war 
horse. This, indeed, is a contradiction, amid 
his sincere Quaker convictions and traditions 
of non-resistance, — a contradiction which 
caused Whittier much rather whimsical per- 
plexity. " Without intending any disparage- 
ment of my peaceable ancestry for many 
generations," he says, " I have still strong 
suspicions that somewhat of the old Norman 
blood, something of the grim Berserker spirit, 
has been bequeathed to me." His friends 
thoroughly enjoyed this incongruity, if he did 
not Nathaniel Hawthorne's quiet humor is 
felt in his allusion to the ''fiery Quaker 
youth to whom the Muse has perversely as- 
signed a battle trumpet." And Lowell, who 



WHITTIER 159 

himself was little troubled with scruples about 
smiting the smiter, cheers on heartily the 
singer whose 

" Vehement heart 
Strains the strait-breasted drab of the Quaker apart/' 

and who leads the fray, 

" Both singing and striking in front of the war, 
And hitting his foes with the mallet of Thor." 

Indeed, the early Quakers in New England 
were not so very remote in spirit from the per- 
secuting but also persecuted Puritans, who used 
to announce calmly to their English governors 
their intention to submit, quietly, to injustice — 
if need be, ^^ after due a7id righteous effort to 
amend it!'' a sort of meekness which their 
oppressors never enjoyed. It is well to remem- 
ber that Puritan and Quaker both often sprang, 
as Whittier indeed has just hinted, from the 
best Norman or Saxon stock ; that courage 
and fearless devotion to duty were precisely 
the qualities bred into them both by the fire of 
persecution ; and that the Friends have never 
sought seclusion, or taken refuge in silence, 
from the strife of a world wherein they knew 



i6o THE NEW ENGLAND POETS- 

other men would fight for conscience' sake, 
though they might only protest and suffer. 
But, indeed, in a great moral crisis like our 
Civil War, the peaceful tenets of Fox have 
always fallen off from many, even of the devout- 
est, among the younger Friends, as easily as 
the drab coat is flung down in the harvest 
field. 

Whittier's gift, in truth, is no such rare flower 
of genius as that to which Hawthorne rightly 
devoted a lifetime of seclusion and artistic con- 
/ secration. His music is nowise unique and 
inimitable. A certain monotonous simplicity, 
also, like the voice of his beloved brook, his 
warmest admirers hardly deny. It has been 
well said, that his love of home, of humanity, 
and of God are hardly more than three out- 
pourings from the same source. He often 
recalls Tennyson's description of 

■ " Him who sings 
To one clear harp in divers tones." 

That it does ring clear and sweet to our 
Yankee ears, at least, is certain. The mis- 
placed accents, the crude rhymes, are undeni- 



WHITTIER i6l 

able, to be sure, but even they are usually 
familiar to the dialect of our own childhood. 
The Mayflower of our woods is the arbutus to 
us, whatever the sin against Latin quantity 
rules, which after all only apply to the name 
given, in a dead language, to an unfamiliar tree ! 
One jingle (or jangle) in the dear, familiar 
childish ballad of " Maud Muller " does perhaps 
set even our teeth on edge. The good gray 
poet himself must have joined in the laugh, a 
decade or two agone, when a picturesque, but 
rather tiresome, old demagogue failed of a 
reelection in the Bay State, and the newspapers 
took up the merry refrain : 

" Of all glad words of tongue or pen, 
The gladdest are these, — we shaii't have Ben I'''' 

Yet even this shocking vulgarism — ben for 
bin, or bean — we have all heard from the lips 
of our good country aunts, as Hosea Biglow 
testifies a score of times, e.g. : 

" Sez he, Pm up to all thet air ; 
I guess I've beii to muster." 

(And by the way, it will amuse any true-blue 
Yankee to learn from the excellent biographer 



1 62 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

of Lowell, Francis H. Underwood, that "this 
dialect is essentially extinct ! ") The contradic- 
tions, the limitations, and even the undoubted 
blemishes, therefore, in Whittier's verse often 
endear him the more to his fellow-provincials. 
We love him as the Scots do Burns, because he 
is just his faulty, glorious self ! 

Whether Whittier's first American ancestor 
was actually a Friend or not is doubtful. Prob- 
ably not, since he held civic and even military 
positions. He certainly sympathized with some 
of the Quaker tenets. He refused to own fire- 
arms, or even to bar his house against the 
Indians, who were often heard whispering 
under his windows in the night, but never 
molested his family, — even when the atroci- 
ties of savage warfare filled the Merrimac 
valley with terror. In that picturesque region 
the family has won a toilsome but indepen- 
dent livelihood from the soil for two centuries 
and a half. The old homestead immortalized 
in "Snowbound" still stands, a few miles from 
Haverhill, shut in by rolling hills from sight 
of all other human habitations. It has been 
purchased recently as a permanent memorial 



WHITTIER 163 

of the poet. I was delighted at my first 
ghmpse from the road, upon a snowy day, 
when a horse in the old barn pushed forth 
his face to greet us, just as eighty years ago 

" The old horse thrust his long head out, 
And grave with wonder gazed about." 

Those earlier Whittiers do not appear to 
have been impelled- to bear testimony against 
the vanities of seventeenth-century Puritanism 
in a form which brought down upon them the 
sharpest edge of persecution. Possibly in these 
bleak Northern hills there was never such mag- 
nificence in steeple-house edifices, splendor of 
priestly robes, or other sinful luxuries as were 
a grievous offence in Boston-on-the-Bay ! 

Of the simplest and hardiest farmer life^ 
"Snowbound," "In Schooldays," "My Play- 
mate," " Barefoot Boy," and other personal 
poems give an absolutely truthful picture. 
This was really Whittier's boyhood ; and his 
early life was much humbler than that of all 
our other poets. But it has been wisely 
pointed out, that the comparison of "Snow- 
bound" to the "Cotter's Saturday Night," 



i64 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

or Whittier's own allusion to '' these Flemish 
pictures of old days," is in one very large 
respect inexact. The circle about the New- 
England winter fire are not peasants ; certainly 
they have never thought of recognizing any 
earthly master. Money was scarce, and books 
were few indeed. But at least the newspapers 
kept them in touch with the great outside 
world. In the local councils and town offices 
the Whittiers had an honorable share. In 
their own narrow, quiet, uneventful world they 
had no superiors. 

In the little district schoolhouse, half a mile 
away, the boy Whittier spent the three winter 
months of each year, the instructor being usu- 
ally himself a boy or youth, fresh from college, 
— if indeed yet graduated. Of the twenty- 
odd volumes in the homestead, the nearest 
approach to poetry was the one in which 

" Ellwood^s meek drab-skirted muse, 
A stranger to the heathen Nine, 
Sang, with a somewhat nasal whine, 
The wars of David and the Jews." 

This dismal " Davideis " does not seem to 
have inspired the boy, though there is a record 



WHITTIER 165 

of his remark, that the warrior king could not 
have been a good Friend ! This, however, may 
be rather a reminiscence of the First Day after- 
noons spent happily with his mother over the 
Old and New Testament, with which his own 
works show a perfect familiarity. 

But a happy chance soon put into his hands 
the one book of all others best fitted to open 
his eyes to the beauty in common things. 
Whittier himself tells the story, in a delightful 
and humorous little prose essay on " Yankee 
Gypsies." The tramps of that day were less 
numerous, and more varied and picturesque, 
if not more deserving, than now. '' One day," 
says Whittier, "we had a call from a 'pawky 
auld carle ' of a wandering Scotchman. To 
him I owe my first introduction to the songs 
of Burns. After eating his bread and cheese, 
and drinking his mug of cider, he gave us 
'Bonnie Doon,' 'Highland Mary,' and 'Auld 
Lang Syne.' " Later performances to which 
Whittier had listened "lacked," as he says, 
"the novel charm of the gaberlunzie's sing- 
ing in the old farmhouse kitchen." Later, 
when the boy was fourteen, his first school- 



1 66 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

master, Joshua Coffin, — afterward his fellow- 
abolitionist, — gave him a copy of Burns' 
poems, and helped him to master the dialect. 
In his own earliest attempts at rhyme, which 
are probably all lost, he even imitated the 
Scotticisms of Burns. But the real benefit of 
that gift he expresses in his own verses on 
the Scotch poet : 

"With clearer eyes I saw the worth 
Of life among the lowly. 
The Bible at his Cotter's hearth 
Had made my own more holy. 

" Why dream of lands of gold and pearl, 
Of loving Knight and Lady, 
When farmer boy and barefoot girl 
Were wandering there already?" 

f To Burns Whittier owes, at least, the first 
clear apprehension of that elemental rule of 
the artist which Longfellow has perhaps 
preached better than he has practised it: 

" That is best which lieth nearest : 
Shape of that thy work of art." 

Whittier learned, with Burns' help, to count 
his treasures aright. 



WHITTIER 167 

" I was rich in flowers and trees, 
Humming-birds and honey-bees ; 
For my sport the squirrel played, 
Plied the snouted mole his trade ; 
For my taste the blackberry cone 
Purpled over hedge and stone ; 
Laughed the brook for my delight 
Through the day and through the night. 
Whispering at the garden wall, 
Talked with me from fall to fall ; 
Mine the sand-rimmed pickerel pond. 
Mine the walnut slopes beyond, . . . 
Still as my horizon grew, 
Larger grew my riches too ; 
All the world I saw or knew 
Seemed a complex Chinese toy. 
Fashioned for a barefoot boy ! " 

At nineteen, Whittier was a tall, slender, 
keen-eyed but shy farmer-boy, hoeing indus- 
triously in the corn-field, — barefooted often, 
still, — or perhaps poring over a book at the 
winter fire. His rhymes had not, apparently, 
turned his own thoughts, nor those of his kin, 
to a different career than that of his ancestry. 
But again, as in the gift of Burns' poems, the 
right spark fell into the quiet, eager young life. 

William Lloyd Garrison, himself only three 
years Whittier' s senior, but already devoted at 



1 68 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

heart to some of the reforms which were to 
constitute the work of his hfe, established a 
paper, the " Free Press," in Newburyport. To 
him some of Whittier's verses had been sent by 
a sister, apparently without the writer's know- 
ledge. The Whittiers had subscribed for the 
paper, "liking its humanitarian tone," and the 
young poet has recorded his delighted surprise 
when the number containing his own verses 
was tossed over the fence from the stage into 
the field where he was at work. 

Not many days after he was summoned in 
haste from his work on the farm. A visitor 
had driven up to the house — a rare event. It 
was the eager young editor, who came to per- 
suade the cautious father that so promising a 
poetic talent demanded higher education and 
encouragement. The opportunity came, in 
humble guise indeed ! Whittier learned the 
shoemaker's art, in its simplest and crudest form, 
from a laborer on the farm, and earned enough 
during the winter to spend six months at the 
new Haverhill academy. He wrote the ode for 
the dedication of the building (verses which 
have utterly perished), and immediately won his 



WHITTIER 169 

master's admiring regard, especially by his 
prose essays. In the six months' term he made 
remarkable progress in English studies, and 
learned some French. An unhappy and brief 
experience as teacher won him the means for a 
second term at the academy. 

With this slender preparation, Whittier almost 
instantly began an active career as editor and 
writer. His verses, in particular, were readily 
published and admired from the first. He 
never had a struggle for recognition. On the 
contrary, it is difficult to understand what he 
had written, for instance, by his twenty-second 
year, that inspired the prophecy quoted in the 
"New England Review" (December, 1829): 
" The culmination of that man's fame will be a 
proud period in the history of our literature." 
Nearly all the verses of this period have been 
carefully suppressed by the maturer taste of the 
poet. There is one passage, rescued against 
his will, that gives a vivid impression of his 
ambitious energy in these years, and also of his 
early devotion to patriotic duty : 

" Land of my fathers ! if the name, 
Now humble and unused to fame, 



170 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

Hereafter burn upon the lip 

As one of those which may not die, 

Linked in eternal fellowship 

With visions pure, and strong, and high, — 

If the wild dreams which quicken now 

The thrilling pulse of heart and brow 

Hereafter take a real form. 

Like spectres changed to beings warm, 

And over temples worn and gray 

The star-like crown of glory shine, 

Thine be the bard^s undying lay, 

The murmur of his praise be thine ! " 

Here we have already, at twenty-two, the 
chief keys of Whittier's verse clearly struck. 
The dangerous fluency and facility, the choice 
of a somewhat obvious — occasionally even of a 
hackneyed — adjective, he never fully escaped. 
The pure aspiration, the clear, straightforward 
vigorous expression, the easy rapid movement 
of the rhythm, everything save the freer expres- 
sion, in this early time, of his own hopes and 
desires, would admit these youthful rhymes, 
without a jar, into a page of " Snowbound," 
or " Tent on the Beach." 

We naturally seek, among an author's earlier 
poems, for verses on the subject whereunto "a 



WHITllER 



171 



young man's fancy lightly turns." Whittier, 
alone, among our great poets and literary men 
generally, never married. The reasons for this 
have never, so far as I know, been fully re- 
vealed. He was in no sense misanthropic, still 
less misogynic, and seems to have been remark- 
ably fitted to make any true-hearted woman 
happy. Nor is there any substantial trace of 
an early disappointment in love. It seems to 
me not unlikely, that he made a silent, lifelong 
sacrifice to the home happiness of his mother 
and sisters. This he himself intimates in his 
correspondence. There is apparently no ade- 
quate evidence that this decision cost him a 
very bitter pang on any especial occasion. 
That a single life is a sacrifice, or a loss, we 
hear often echoed, as when the dear maiden 
aunt is described, 

" The sweetest woman ever Fate 
Perverse denied a household mate." 

The feminine element is indeed very pervasive 
throughout " Snowbound." Not only is- this 
true of the central domestic picture, but in the 
larger village background. ''At every house," 



172 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

as the teams break a way along the snow-laden 

road, 

" the watchful young men saw 

Sweet doorway pictures of the curls 
And curious eyes of merry girls." 

And near the beginning of "Yankee Gypsies" 
is an unexpected bit of Oriental color, where we 
see "bright eyes glancing above the uplifted 
muff, like a sultana's behind the folds of 
her yashmakr Doubtless, however, it was 
his Quaker soul-brother Bayard Taylor who 
brought this word and this glimpse back to 
the homekeeping poet. 

Evidence for authentic love-making of Whit- 
tier's own begins " In Schooldays," at about the 
age of seven, with the tender words : 

" '• Fm sorry that I spelt the word, 
I hate to go above you, 
Because,' the brown eyes lower fell, 
' Because, you see, I love you ! ' " 

And the same refrain is repeated at the close 
of the little poem, in a saddened minor key 
very rarely heard in Whittier's verse : 

" He lives to learn, in life's hard school, 
How few who pass above him 



WHITTIER 173 

Lament their triumph and his loss, 
Like her, — because they love him ! " 

But this little sweetheart, probably the daugh- 
ter of a near neighbor, upon whose grave the 
grasses of forty years had blown, cannot be 
the same as '' My Playmate," who at the last 

parting 

" Kist the lips of kith and kin " 
but 

" laid her hand in mine : 
What more could ask the bashful boy 
Who fed her father's kine ? " 

This later child-love passes, in the poem, to 
a long and prosperous life in the Southland. 
There may be some real hint here, and else- 
where, of an early regard for a woman who 
perhaps then seemed above him in social sta- 
tion. The striking references in " Memories '■' 
are clearly to a woman, still living, whom he 
had known and held dear as a schoolboy (per- 
haps at twenty) : 

" I hear again thy low replies, 

I feel thy arm. within my own, 
And timidly again uprise 
The fringed lids of hazel eyes, 

With soft brown tresses overblown." 



174 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

The definiteness of the '' local color," in iris 
and hair, indicates realism ! Whittier would 
hardly have accepted Emerson's mystical 
apophthegm, that the truly blest lover " Loveth 
downward, and not up ! " At threescore and 
ten he gave expression to the opposite senti- 
ment in "The Henchman," which might per- 
haps bear the excision of several among its 
eleven quatrains, — yet every one adds force to 
the single thought : 

" The love that no return doth crave 
To knightly level lifts the slave." 

Yet there seems to be a trace of evidence, 
that the longing for a full return of earthly love 
demanded utterance at last, though age and 
death had made it doubly impossible. The 
effort to envelope it, as it were, under an alien 
address only convinces one reader, at least, that 
the song in " A Sea Dream " is that saddest 
utterance, the memory of what might have 
been, from a heart that has never ceased to 
feel the loneliness of solitude. It is not a 
guardian angel to whom he cries ; but the 
wife he never won : 



WHITHER 175 

" But turn to me thy dear girl-face 
Without the angePs crown, 
The wedded roses of thy lips, 
Thy loose hair rippling down 
In waves of golden brown." 

Yet this is undoubtedly all we shall ever know 
--' -or guess. 

" He came and went, and left no sign 
Behind him save the song he sung." 

These closing words are plainly intended to 
baffle our own curious gaze after him. (Since 
these sentences were written some very positive 
and definite statements have been published in 
regard to Whittier's youthful attachment; but 
those best able to speak are forever silent, and 
never meant to leave a clearer sign behind 
them. Far be it from me to tear away the veil 
they drew.) 

We have followed, too far afield perhaps, 
a path which leads no-whither; but the fact that 
a man so gentle, so sympathetic, yet so ardent, 
walked alone all his days, is really interesting, 
and might be in some sense a key to character : 
or, at least, the cause for some of his artistic 



176 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

limitations, since he confessedly missed the 
happier and richer inner side of life ! But my 
immediate purpose was to lead toward a phase 
of his poetry which is less often noticed. 

If the question of slavery and the Abolition 
agitation had never invaded our life, Whittier's 
career might have been as tranquil and change- 
less as the full current of the Merrimac by 
which he dwelt. His poetry would at least 
have been a faithful echo of the familiar sounds, 
and a mirror for the hills and lakes, of his be- 
loved New England. 

Of such poetry from him we have, as it is, 
perhaps an adequate mass. The rather scanty 
legends of the Eastern coast he sought out and 
versified, as in the "Wreck of the Palatine." 
Others, notably a favorite of boyhood, "Amy 
Wentworth," he invented for himself. Of his 
"Songs of Labor," the "Huskers" and the 
"Shoemakers" in particular are transcripts from 
his own early memories. We need not dwell on 
this side af his life-work, because its results are 
quite as popular, to say the least, as they de- 
serve ; and also because his experience uplifted 
him to higher levels of verse. 



WHITTIER 177 

The influence of Garrison had an important 
part, as we have seen, in making Whittier a 
better educated young man, an author by pro- 
fession, and thereby, at first in a very humble 
way, an editor. These latter duties were in- 
deed often combined or alternated with hard 
work upon the Haverhill farm. 

As to the cause which was already the main 
purpose of Garrison's life, Whittier did not at 
once take his stand. To be an Abolitionist 
meant social and political ostracism, scorn, prob- 
ably persecution. Whittier was peculiarly sen- 
sitive to ridicule, fond of approval, throbbing 
with literary ambition. He did not, perhaps, 
hesitate as to duty, when the duty was clear to 
him ; but he did weigh the matter well, and 
count the cost. He thought he might go un- 
flinching to the stake, if need be ; but was sure 
he could never wear with dignity the coat of tar 
and feathers ! Yet his^final decision in 1833, 
five years after Garrison took his decisive stand, 
was equally irrevocable. In June of that 
year, he published his vigorous prose pam- 
phlet, "■ Justice and Expediency : or. Slavery 
Considered with a View to Its Rightful and 



178 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

Effectual Remedy, Abolition." This at once 
gave Whittier a leading place in the advanced 
ranks of Emancipationists. Soon after he 
printed, in the '' Haverhill Gazette," his famous 
lines to Garrison, loyally hailing him as his 
chief, " Champion of those who groan beneath 
oppression's iron hand." 

This leadership of Garrison Whittier never 
ceased to acknowledge, and he has declared 
that he took more pride in his name among 
the sixty-two signatures to the Declaration of 
Principles, drafted by Garrison in December, 
1833, when the American Antislavery Society 
was founded in Philadelphia, than in any liter-' 
ary achievement. (See Whittier's reminiscences 
in the ''Atlantic Monthly" for February, 1874.) 

But it will be remembered that a great rift 
opened between the Garrisonian abolitionists, 
who abstained from all political action, — who 
would even gladly have broken up the Union 
to escape all connection with slaveholders, — 
and the founders of the Liberal party, later 
merged into the Free Soil movement, and 
finally in the Republican organization. These 
latter sought the limitation and eventual abroga- 



WHITTIER 1 79 

tion of slavery by peaceful, political, and con- 
stitutional action. To this less violent wing of 
abolitionism Whittier's judgment led him, and 
for fifteen years (i 839-1 854) Garrison regarded 
him — most intolerantly — almost as a renegade 
from the cause. From 1854 onward, to the full 
triumph of 1863, they were again in harmony 
personally, and to a great extent in their meth- 
ods of work. Throughout the earlier struggle, 
of course, Whittier's fiery lyrics were copied 
everywhere — even into the ''Liberator." In- 
deed, they were at each fresh crisis the clearest 
voice of the fast-growing Northern sentiment 
against slavery. 

Among the earliest poems of this period, the 
"Song of the Kansas Emigrants " was a house- 
hold word in that unhappy Border State, and 
indeed actually the marching song of the west- 
ward pilgrim trains : 

" We cross the prairie, as of old 
Tlie pilgrims crossed the sea, 
To make the West, as they the East, 
The homestead of the free ! " 

Perhaps the most familiar and unforgettable 
of all is " Massachusetts to Virginia " : 



i8o THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

"■ The blast from Freedom^s Northern hills, upon its south- 
ern way, 
Bears greeting to Virginia from Massachusetts Bay." 

There is the sure prescience of final victory 
in such lines as the closing verses : 

" No slave hunt in our borders, — no pirate on our strand! 
No fetters in the Bay State, — no slave upon our land ! " 

The masterpiece among Whittier's political 
lyrics is, however, without question, " Ichabod." 
This terrible winged arrow of reproof was 
written in 1850, after Whittier's distant kins- 
man, Daniel Webster, had made that famous 
seventh of March speech of conciliation, or 
surrender, the moral significance of which is 
still under discussion. Surely no man has the 
right to pass such merciless judgment on an- 
other. The culmination seems actually Dant- 
esque in its very thought : 

" Of all we loved and honored, naught 
Save power remains, — 
A fallen angel's pride of thought, 

Still strong in chains. ! 

" All else is gone ; from those great eyes 
The soul has fled ; 



WHITTIER l8l 

When faith is lost, when honor dies, 
The man is dead ! " 

(6y: "Inferno," XXXIII, 121-135.) 

Whittier never retracted these fearful words 
directly, but his personal feeling toward Web- 
ster softened greatly with the years. Toward 
the end of his life he wrote " The Lost Occa- 
sion," which he set beside " Ichabod," — quite 
out of chronological order, — in the final edition 
of his works. Here he expresses the fullest 
confidence that Webster, if he had lived to see 
the Civil War, would have been foremost to 
urge on the North. There is even a clinging 
personal regard, that almost forgets resignation 
to Heaven's will, in the words : 

" Ah, cruel fate, that closed to thee, 
O sleeper by the Northern sea, 
The gates of opportunity ! " 

A part of the compromise to which Webster 
gave his assent on this famous occasion was 
the Fugitive Slave Law. The comparatively 
few attempts to enforce this law in North- 
ern States manufactured antislavery sentiment 
faster than almost anything else. Upon those 



1 82 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

who urged submission to it as a duty of good 
citizenship, Whittier poured all the vials of 
scorn and contempt. " A Sabbath Scene," for 
instance, has a caustic fire, a rough dramatic 
power, that carries it safely off over such 
rhymes as figure and eager, glided and 
^^ strided/' teacher and nature, sticmbling and 



As for the John Brown episode in our his- 
tory, Whittier celebrated in striking verses the 
incident of Brown's kissing the negro child on 
his march to the gallows. The contest as to 
the real occurrence of this incident we need 
not touch upon. But there is, in this poem, a 
curious bit of evidence against the popular 
feeling that Whittier was the inspired prophet, 
as well as poet, of Freedom. The pious prayer, 

" Nevermore may yon blue ridges the Northern rifle hear," 

must remind us that, only twenty months later, 
countless regiments were marching southward, 
to the swinging refrain of " John Brown's 
Body," for a war whose bloodiest battles were 
to redden Virginian soil. 

During the war itself, the heart of the patriot 



WHITTIER 183 

and reformer throbbed fierce and hot agahist 
the strait-waistcoat of the Quaker. How he 
ought to feel he tells us, e.g. in the ''Anniver- 
sary Poem," written for an audience of Friends 
in 1863. But ''The Summons" has certainly 
another sound : 

" Shamed be the hands that idly fold, 
And lips that woo the reed's accord^ 
When laggard Time the hour has tolled 
For true with false and new with old 
To fight the battles of the Lord ! " 

He repines, even, if I read the words aright, 
at the physical weakness which alone will keep 
him from the tented iield : 

" To him your summons comes too late 
Who sinks beneath his armor's weight, 
And has no answer but God-speed!" 

To a certain grim delight taken by Whittier, 
in spite of himself, in valorous battle (for a 
righteous cause, be it well understood !), we 
have already alluded, and many illustrations 
could be accumulated. Of course^ it is not the 
savage glee in strife itself that we feel so often 
in the Homeric fray or the battles of the Ni- 



1 84 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

belungen. Still, in the best of all Whittier's 
ballads upon remoter themes, the " Pipes at 
Lucknow," we are not told to shudder at the 
crisis, when 

" The tartan clove the turban, 
As the Goomtee cleaves the plain." 

The reversion to peaceful tasks produced 
almost instantaneously, as it seemed, Whittier's 
most popular and probably most permanent 
work. "Snowbound" appeared in 1865, just 
after the close of the war. This poem has 
been universally accepted as the absolutely 
truthful and final picture of country life in 
New England. There is hardly a word in it 
indicating that the Quaker household felt itself 
in any respect apart from the other elements of 
the community. The '' Inner Light " of trust 
and hope which brightens the saddest memories 
of change and loss is but the common faith of 
humanity, the voice of conscience. By this 
poem, we firmly believe, Whittier's name will 
live as long as the influence of New England 
itself is remembered among men. 

Only in a single passage does the problem of 
the hour disturb the idyllic contemplation of the 



WHITTIER 185 

past. After describing the boyish schoolmas- 
ter, the poet digresses, in rather forced fashion : 

"... of such as he 
Shall Freedom's young apostles be, 
Who, following in War's bloody trail, 
Shall every Ungering wrong assail." . . . 

There are twenty-five lines here which could 
be spared. And the reformer's conscience is 
still not easy in his brief repose. At the last, 

" I hear again the voice that bids 
The dreamer leave his dream midway, 
For larger hopes and graver fears." 

On the whole, however, Whittier's poetic art, 
like his reformer's career, had now culminated, 
though much that is of permanent value and 
charm may doubtless be culled from his later 
as from his earlier work. The process of win- 
nowing the wheat from the chaff will in his 
case be a severe and seemingly cruel task of 
time. Not only whole poems of transitory 
value or meaning, but many a weak, incongru- 
ous stanza, even from lyrics of lasting beauty, 
will doubtless fall away silently with the years. 
Thus, when Charles Sumner died, Longfellow 



1 86 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

(of whom Emerson, in his turn, complained 
that he "wrote too much") gathered up a 
Httle handful of his choicest and purest gems, 
and produced a glistening mosaic of only 
thirty-six briefest lines, worthy to be repro- 
duced and eternalized in letters of gold upon 
monumental marble. Whittier published his 
tribute in just six times as many verses ! Yet 
the author of " Ichabod " should have known 
better the limits of lyric effectiveness. In the 
stead of these many stanzas, eight of the two 
hundred and sixteen lines alone would have 
been, to my mind, a loftier and more enduring 
tribute : 

'•'• God said : '■ Break thou these yokes ; undo 
These heavy burdens. I ordain 
A work to last thy whole life through, 
A ministry of strife and pain. 

" ' Forego thy dreams of lettered ease, 
Put thou the scholar's promise by, 
The rights of men are more than these.' 
He heard, and answered : '■ Here am I!' " 

But, indeed, Whittier himself has winnowed 
his early poems, at least, with a severity which 
in some instances we feel to be excessive. Thus 



WHITTIER 187 

from July, 1830, to the end of the next year, 
while editing the " New England Review," he 
made forty poetical contributions, of which only 
t/iree are taken up into the final revised edition 
of 1888. Still, an exhaustive study of all this 
youthful work would not be enjoyable or profit- 
able, as in the case of Hawthorne, since so 
much of it was hastily turned off — and also 
because Whittier never attained any such re- 
markable mastery of form as the author of the 
''Gray Champion" and the "Scarlet Letter." 

There are still three features of Whittier's 
best work to which I wish in closing to call 
especial attention. 

In the first place, the accurate yet idealized* 
description of natural scenery. This is a con- 
stant characteristic of his earliest as of his latest 
writings. He is far too modest in the " Proem " : 

" Unskilled the subtle lines to trace, 
Or softer shades of Nature's face, 
I view lier common forms with unanointed eyes." 

On the contrary, those thoughtful men and 
women who are most familiar with the scenes 
amid which he dwelt in lifelong content, find 



1 88 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

themselves, often indeed, gazing in memory 
upon them, as it were, through Whittier's eyes. 
The best single illustration of this is a poem 
which is to many, perhaps, as familiar and as 
dear as "Snowbound" itself: the "Last Walk 
in Autumn." This seems to me to claim a high 
artistic merit; and a deeper harmony of music 
and meditative pathos than usual haunts even 
such quiet lines as : 

"And scarlet berries tell where bloomed the sweet wild- 
rose." 

Indeed, to a stranger we might be tempted 
to offer this, rather than " Snowbound " itself, 
first of all, as convincing evidence that our 
Quaker laureate of Puritan New England is a 
far-sighted and aspiring artist. The charm of 
foreign journeying has rarely been more thrill- 
ingly sung than by this home-keeping minstrel, 
though he begins : 

" I know not how, in other lands, 
The changing seasons come and go." 

It chances that these same stanzas offer 
equally good illustrations of the other two traits 



WHITTIER 189 

to which I undertook to call attention. One is 
his close and tender attachment to his friends. 
The tributes to Emerson, to Bayard Taylor, 
to Charles Sumner, form three noble strophes of 
the " Last Walk." Taylor again appears, with 
James T. Fields, in the "Tent on the Beach." 
There is still a third poem, an early one, dedi- 
cated to Sumner, entitled "To C. S." Taylor's 
death called out a series of three sonnets : a 
form Whittier rarely essayed. A large num- 
ber of his works took the form of direct ad- 
dresses to his friends, or to men he admired, at 
the crises of their fate. For example : 

" Thy error, Fremont, simply was to act 
A brave man's part, without the statesmen's tact," etc. 

One of the brightest and happiest of these 
personal tributes, not reprinted, I think, in most 
editions, is "How Mary Grew." It is a me- 
morial of an heroic woman who was still living 
until 1897, in Philadelphia, Miss Mary Grew. 
In old age. Holmes and Whittier, in particular, 
have often exchanged melodious greetings. 

But thirdly, and lastly, we must turn to a 
side of Whittier's poetry which has always 



IQO THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

appealed to the heart of universal humanity. I 
mean the hymns in which he utters, so simply 
and clearly as hardly any other has done, a per- 
fect trust in and resignation to the power that 
guides our earthly ways aright. A cheerful 
optimism is indeed characteristic, as was said, 
of all our New England poets. Each might 
have uttered Lowell's words : 



" For me Fate gave, whatever she else denied, 
A nature sloping to the southern side." 



Longfellow's last written line is no less bright 
with hope and trust. Emerson's lyrics fly 
heavenward, like homing pigeons. Yet in the 
expression of religious faith and truthfulness 
Whittier has no rival among them. And here, 
at least, we account his absolute simplicity 
among the highest of poetic virtues. 

It is not possible to indicate adequately our 
real feeling in regard to certain utterances of 
Whittier without allusion to a personal experi- 
ence. It befell that the dear comrade of many 
a wide-ranging pilgrimage, a close and faithful 
sharer in joys and sorrows, lay tranquilly await- 



WHITTIER 191 

ing the final parting. No physical distress 
save weakness overshadowed the last weeks. 
From that peaceful upper chamber went forth 
winged thoughts of unselfish helpfulness and 
eager interest for numberless friends. Even 
the rich intellectual life glowed long with steady 
though quiet flame. But in the last few days, 
while there was no clouding of the mind, its 
needs grew slighter, like those of the body, 
until only the craving for music and for devo- 
tional poetry remained. And last of all, down 
to a time- when life itself could only be counted 
by hoursv " My Psalm," the '* Eternal Good- 
ness," and the nameless hymn at the close of 
*' Tent on the Beach " were still asked for again 
and again. As Tennyson doubtless crossed 
the bar with his own lyric of unquestioning 
trust to cheer him on his way, — so as pure, 
gentle and brave a soul as I ever knew passed, 
almost happily, out of consciousness, with the 
murmured words as it were still upon the lips : 

" I know not where His islands lift 
Their fronded pahns in air ; 
I only know I cannot drift ■ 
Beyond His love and care." 



r92 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

And so, in one sadly broken circle, at least, 
these and other lines of Whittier's will always 
be something nearer and more precious than 
mere poetic words. 

It was not a part of our purpose to trace 
fully the outward life of Whittier, which has 
been, in a sense, uneventful. That is, there 
have been no marked changes in his circum- 
stances which have had a vital effect upon his 
work. He was more of a politician than is 
generally supposed, in a generation when poli- 
tics were perhaps more largely vitalized than 
now with moral motives and efforts. In 1835 
and 1836 he even sat in the state legislature. 
He was in Philadelphia in May, 1838, when 
a mob burned Pennsylvania Hall, then just 
erected by the Antislavery Society. His paper, 
the '' Pennsylvania Freeman," was also burnt 
out, but he continued its publication for a year 
longer, when illness compelled his return to 
Haverhill. 

He was for many years poor, and his pen 
won him very slender returns. The old home- 
stead was sold in 1840, and from that time 
onward Whittier's legal residence was in the 



WHITTIER 193 

neighboring town of Amesbury. It is as ''Her- 
mit of Amesbury " that he is addressed in one 
of Longfellow's latest sonnets, *' The Three 
Silences." From 1847-185 7 he was "corre- 
sponding editor" of the "Washington National 
Era," in which " Uncle Tom's Cabin " first ap- 
peared (185 1 ). It contained, too, many of 
Whittier's finest poems, and also the best of his 
prose work. Especially notable was " Margaret 
Smith's Journal," a series of careful pictures 
from seventeenth-century New England life, 
with a rather slight thread of plot and incident. 

Perhaps 1857 is the year of Whittier's fully 
assured literary success. In this year his col- 
lected poems appeared, and he was invited into 
the little circle of leading poets of freedom and 
other literary men, who founded the "Atlantic 
Monthly." The time of poverty and obscurity 
was over, and the very name of Abolitionist was 
soon to become a title of honor. 

Whittier's old age was clouded by few sor- 
rows, after the loss of his two sisters, so tenderly 
recorded in " Snowbound." With this poem 
he won in an instant the heart of every New 
Englander. He lived on for nearly thirty years 



194 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

after the war, amid a generation that delighted 
to honor the AboHtionists, whom their fathers 
had denounced, mobbed, almost hanged. As 
he himself says, the voice of fault-finding grew 
rare indeed. 

" Love watches o'er my quiet ways, 
Kind voices speak my name, 
And lips that find it hard to praise 
Are slow, at least, to blame." 

Discussions as to Barbara Frietchie's actual 
existence, complaints that he had painted Floyd 
Ireson too black, and the women of Marblehead 
as too savage, demands from the Block Islanders 
that the visiting pirates, not the resident wreck- 
ers, should be credited with the plundering of 
the Palatine generations ago, — such pigmy as- 
saults might well make the scarred veteran cry : 

" Methinks the spirit's temper grows 
Too soft in this still air ! " 

Surrounded by loving friends, fearless, tran- 
quil, indeed only glad to enter into his rest, he 
bade farewell to earth, after eighty-five years of 
fearless devotion to his brother-men, in Sep- 
tember, 1892. 



VI 

LOWELL 

Poet and Patriot 

The stately pair of volumes entitled " Letters 
of James Russell Lowell," carefully edited in 
1893 by Professor Norton, is one of the most 
valuable books of its class. The departed poet 
was most fortunate in his editor. Everything 
which would merely gratify an impertinent 
curiosity has been quietly pruned away. But 
even then, as Mr. Norton says of his friend, 
" his poems and his letters show him with rare 
completeness as he truly was." Herein the 
editor was fortunate as well. From this rich 
mass of autobiographic material I shall, neces- 
sarily, draw freely. But it is a book which 
should be read, entire, without haste. With 
Lowell's poems and essays, it would alone suf- 
fice for a year or two of earnest profitable study; 
better, doubtless, than the works of any other 
195 



196 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

one American man of letters. It should be 
republished in a less monumental and costly 
form. 

Lowell had some advantages not enjoyed by 
any of the writers we have already discussed : 
including this, that their young manhood coin- 
cided with his childhood, so that he entered 
largely into the fruits of their labors. The other 
five most popular New England authors were 
all born in the first ten years of our century. 
Lowell's birth falls near the close of the second 
decade, on February 22, 18 19. (This coincidence 
with Washington's anniversary, by the way, is 
used with effect by George William Curtis, in 
that eloquent oration upon his old friend, which 
was so nearly his own swan-song. The birth of 
New England's other most gifted child, Nathan- 
iel Hawthorne, on the fourth of July, seems a 
more whimsical stroke of chance. Holmes' 
birth, in the shadow of Harvard and on Com- 
mencement Day, appears unmistakably provi- 
dential in its fitness. Though outlived for 
several years by two members of the illus- 
trious group, Lowell yet belongs in many ways 
to the next generation after them all. His early 



LOWELL 197 

manhood was passed under the healthier con- 
ditions, healthier certainly for scholarship and 
literature, at least, which they were aiding so 
largely to bring about. 

Toward Emerson, especially, his senior by 
sixteen years, Lowell always takes the attitude 
of a loyally grateful though independent disci- 
ple. " Emerson awakened us, saved us from 
the body of this death. It is the sound of the 
trumpet that the young soul longs for, careless 
what breath may fill it. Sidney heard it in 
* Chevy Chase,' and we in Emerson." These 
words refer to a time when Lowell was an 
eager boy in his 'teens, while Emerson was 
already "midway in life's journey." The en- 
tire paper (" Emerson the Lecturer ") renders 
full thanks for a contii>uous debt through more 
than thirty years since then. 

For Hawthorne, also, who was born the year 
after Emerson, Lowell had the utmost admiration, 
saying, by implication, that no man had more 
deeply impressed him " with the constant pres- 
ence of that indefinable thing we call genius " (Li- 
troduction to "Biglow Papers," Second Series). 
And he intimates elsewhere^ that Hawthorne is 



1 98 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

our one great story-teller, worth forty Boccaccios. 
(In '' Fitz Adams' Story.") 

Lowell, then, stands from his boyhood upon 
a vantage which Emerson and Longfellow had 
aided in winning for him — and he does honor 
to his masters. With much of Emerson's ideal- 
ism, and something of his mysticism as well, 
Lowell's keener sense of humor and his warmer 
temperament kept his feet more firmly and con- 
stantly planted upon our earth. His scholarship, 
too, ploughed much deeper than Longfellow's 
eclectic Humanism, as the essays on Dante, 
Chaucer, the Trouveres, etc., suffice to show. 

He took a delight at least as deep as theirs in 
the scholar's " illuminate seclusion " of industri- 
ous ease ; and yet he was early forced into 
far more practical relations than they ever had 
with contemporary life. It was, indeed, already 
a life more deeply stirred by moral struggle than 
that of the earlier agricultural and conservative 
New England in which Whittier, Hawthorne, 
and others had approached maturity. 

Mr. Norton says, though I do not at all 
understand him, that after Jackson's admin- 
istration no more such men could be born. 



LOWELL 199 

It seems, at any rate, clear, that no patriotic 
young American could escape the rude inter- 
ruption of his scholastic or artistic career by 
the great struggle for the national life, which 
was to culminate in civil war. Longfellow 
might pay his tribute once for all to Emanci- 
pation, and return to his study ; Hawthorne 
might touch lightly on slavery, in his life of 
Pierce, as an evil to be endured in patience 
until divinely removed in some way as yet 
inscrutable ; but Lowell was of a more ag- 
gressive generation. The time came, indeed, 
when even the dreamer Hawthorne found that 
his thoughts must busy themselves '' Chiefly 
about War Matters." Lowell, certainly, had 
quite too much of Milton's and Marvell's Puri- 
tan temper to seclude himself an hour longer 
among his books, when to every patriot had 
come 

" the moment to decide, 
In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil 
side." 

And that moment arrived for him, when at 
twenty he came to realize that the Abolition- 
ists must be heard ; those Abolitionists whom 



200 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

he had just been ridiculing in the graduation 
poem. (Cf. p. 209.) 

Perhaps most men will ascribe the difference 
between Lowell's life and that of his neighbors 
and friends, — Emerson, Longfellow, Haw- 
thorne, Holmes, — to his own eager, impetuous 
nature, rather than to age or circumstances : 
and there is, at least, some truth in that 
view. Clearly he had far less of docile recep- 
tivity, as a scholar, than Longfellow. We 
can hardly imagine him a patient translator, 
year after year, even of the " Commedia." 
And he accepted little, indeed, of Emerson's 
calm, contemplative outlook on human exist- 
ence. 

When Hosea Biglow, a youth of twenty- 
eight only, leaped into the political discussion 
of the Mexican war time, no one called him 
a dreamer, though some harder names were 
used; and almost ever since, indeed long 
before, one ''scholar in politics" has been 
very much in evidence. As a politician, in 
the best sense of that much-abused word, he 
was alert, practical, and wise : though always 
with a longing eye turned back toward his 



LOWELL 20 1 

proper pursuits. Emerson's essay on " Poli- 
tics " is an abstract treatise, with some ap- 
plications to current events, or rather condi- 
tions. But Lowell's paper in i860, entitled 
''The Election in November," was written 
for the definite purpose of aiding Abraham 
Lincoln's candidacy : though it, too, is cer- 
tainly not lacking in appeals to eternal moral 
principles. This essay is, moreover, in Lowell's 
collected works, but one in a goodly group of 
similar papers and orations, which might have 
been still increased. 

Even amid the turmoil of a Republican na- 
tional convention, Lowell's personal address 
and conversational persuasiveness once aided, 
materially, in defeating a nomination regarded 
by him and his friends as suicidal. Only his 
absence from the country, in a great diplo- 
matic office, prevented him from sharing with 
his friend Curtis in the second similar triumph 
within his party, and in a third less successful 
struggle, — as well as in the famous '' Mug- 
wump " revolt from party allegiance that 
followed. 

When Hawthorne, in 1853, took the lucra- 



202 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

tive Liverpool consulship, it was solely because 
this would bring him the financial indepen- 
dence which his genius had failed to win. 
Though hailed with delight by Sumner as the 
"one bright spot" in Pierce's administration, 
the appointment was widely criticised as a 
barefaced repayment for the reluctant cam- 
paign biography. But when Lowell was sent 
to England, though he was welcomed by 
** Punch " as the Ambassador of American 
Literature to the court of St. James, it was 
generally accepted here at home — as was his 
earlier mission to Spain — as the rare selec- 
tion of the one fittest man for the post. 

Whatever the cause, then, whether in the 
man or the circumstances, it seems plain that 
Lowell's career does illustrate, as no other has 
yet done, the costly tribute paid by the highest 
American scholarship and literary power to our 
political life. He did not, indeed, sacrifice his 
career as an author to any such extent as his 
friend, George William Curtis, gave up belles- 
lettres for journalism, and for the public causes 
he served so effectively through that channel. 
But there was, nevertheless, a real sacrifice. 



LOWELL 203 

more real in his case than in Mr. Curtis', how- 
ever adequate the compensation may have 
been. He who sang so stoutly " by the em- 
bers of loss I count my gain," would hardly 
have indulged, without good reason, in serious 
repining over the work interrupted by the calls 
to patriotic duty. Yet the private letters of the 
youthful Abolitionist, of the learned professor, 
of the ambassador, are full of complaint against 
all which had distracted him from verse. For 
instance, as he enters his seventieth year, he 
says, with all earnestness : " A poet shouldn't 
be, nay, he can't be, anything else, without loss 
to him as poet : however much he may gain as 
man." Of course, this must not be construed 
with slavish literalness. Our poets cannot be 
hermits nor monks. Still, of Lowell the writer 
far more than of any contemporary, it is con- 
stantly said : The man was far greater than all 
the memorials he has left of himself. They do 
not adequately reveal his genius. 

This is probably quite true ; and yet it is no 
final measure for the usefulness of his life. The 
thcH.isands who heard his *' Commemoration 
Ode," or the anniversary address, at Harvard, 



204 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

realized how the whole man multiplied — for 
the living hearers at least, and doubtless through 
them for the after time as well — the force and 
\ value of the winged words. 



The Outward Life 

Lowell's father was himself a distinguished 
clergyman and scholar, a lesser member of the 
Channing group. That odor of old Russia 
leather bindings, the familiarity with ponderous 
folios as the building-blocks of infancy, which 
the Autocrat thinks so desirable, were among 
Lowell's earliest impressions : though not ear- 
lier than the murmur of the wind in the stately 
elms and ash trees, or the " mystical cry " of 
the herons, that still build in the Elmwood 
thickets, and nowhere else for miles around. 
This fine old estate of Elmwood, a mile beyond 
the college gate, and under the slope of Mount 
Auburn, was his home from birth. Earlier 
members of the race had been planted, like the 
forbears of Longfellow and Whittier, in the 
Merrimac valley : at Newbury. In " Cam- 
bridge Thirty Years Ago " (a date which would 



LOWELL 205 

strictly point to the precocious poet's fifth year) 
is a delicious picture of the quiet old suburban 
village and all its quaint "characters." In 
"■ Under the Willows " is a most tender picture 
of the poet's immediate surroundings. 

Two lifelong passions, for books and for 
outdoor sights and sounds, took root with 
life itself. As a Sophomore of seventeen, he 
writes lovingly of his own new Milton in calf 
binding, of an English Coleridge just given 
him by his father, and of the eight-volume 
octavo of Shakspeare, for which he hopes 
to afford fourteen dollars " next month." This 
inclination to spend his next month's income, 
especially for a rare book, was also lifelong. 

But just about the same time, his earliest 
extant verses are addressed, in genuine affec- 
tion, to " Our Old Horse Chestnut Tree." 
They are, it may be added, quite free from 
the pedantic stiffness and insincerity of most 
boyish verses. Lines like 

" And thou hast heard our merry shout 
(My brother Bob and I) '' 

have a truthful rinof. We can well believe 



2o6 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

that, rocking in its boughs, these keen-eyed 
boys had indeed often 

" Listened to the song-bird's lay, 
Or watched him build his nest." 

The ability to express himself in verse seems 
to have been almost inborn with Lowell. It 
is quite credible that he often wrote in rhyme 
because he had not time for prose. Indeed, 
he says it himself (in verse), beginning his 
" Letter from Boston " : 

" Dear M. By way of saving time, 
ril do this letter up in rhyme." 

Even in these boyish days, his thoughts, 
such as they were, threw themselves into verse 
without effort. There is a capital letter to 
his friend Loring, in which he announces : 

" I'm readin' Burns the poet, 
And as I wished to let you know it, 
I thought the brawest gate to show it, 

An' mak ye smile, 
Wad be (tho' far I fa' below it) 
To try his style." 

This rather elaborate movement is carried 
through nineteen stanzas, all scribbled the 



LOWELL 207 

same day, despite a long interruption, through 
the arrival of a guest for dinner. This guest 
was the very young woman — perhaps his 
cousin — whose unrivalled charms the poem 
itself celebrates. The effusion is finished after 
ten o'clock that night, closing with an elabo- 
rate curse upon " Geordie," if he ever shows 
it ! The end reveals no falling-off in vigor : 

" Or warse than a', may certain lasses 
Cut faithless Geordie as he passes, 
An' sternly eye wi' quizzin' glasses 

The luckless swain, 
An' smilin' walk with stupid asses 

To gie him pain ! " 

As to the young poet's accuracy in the use 
of mock-Scottish dialect, others must judge ; 
but the versification seems already from a 
master's hand. His early fondness for Burns 
Lowell may have owed to his mother. She 
was of Scotch descent, while her mother came 
from the Orkney Islands. She taught Lowell 
to love the old ballads and legends, the myths 
and marvels of folk-lore. The poet felt that 
he inherited from her alone the romantic side 
of his nature. In the same boyish corre- 



2o8 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

spondence, Whittier is quoted and applauded 
for "sticking up for old New England." It 
is a pity we have not, also, one of Whittier' s 
early attempts in Burns' dialect. 

At this time, Longfellow had completed 
his five years as professor at Bowdoin, and,, 
after a second period of European travel, had' 
settled at Harvard. When Lowell, in 1838, 
was leaving college, a restless youth of nine^ 
teen, the elder poet at thirty-one was publish- 
ing his romance " Hyperion," and collecting 
his early poems under the dreamily fanciful 
title, "Voices of the Night." Whether he 
was ever actually Lowell's instructor, I do not 
know. 

The young prince of Elmwood was a wil- 
ful student, striving to read everything except 
the books prescribed by his teachers, and 
cherishing a most robust dislike for mathe- 
matics. In this disposition to go his own 
way, and absorb whatever intellectual food 
he best enjoyed, he doubtless received en- 
couragement from the Concord philosopher, 
who was the first to arouse his soul to loftiest 
ambitions. 



LOWELL 209 

The young Lowell, though chosen class 
poet, was absent at graduation. He was, in 
fact, suffering the penalties of rustication, 
pent up amid the " milder shades " of Con- 
cord. This doom befell him through his per- 
sistent neglect of prescribed books and tasks. 
There is a brief reminiscence of this stay in 
Concord in the " Biglow Papers": 

" I know the village, though ; was sent there once, 
A-schoolin', 'cause to home I played the dunce." 

His phrase hits the exact truth, as was his 
habit : due, perhaps, to the day of his nativ- 
ity. Even the Faculty that reluctantly exiled 
him, knew how far he was from the real 
dunces. Emerson was kind to the restless 
boy-exile, and in their walks together showed 
him some of his favorite woodland haunts. 
The spiritual influences of the philosopher 
young Lowell as yet resisted. Indeed, this 
same class poem ridiculed the Transcendent- 
alists, and also the Abolitionists. 

But, before that very year ran out, Lowell 
not only secured his coveted '' sheepskin " 
after all, but, what is far more important, 



2IO THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

had seen a great light, at least as to slavery. 
" A third party, or, rather, no party, is se^ 
cretly rising up in this country, whose voice ( 
will soon be heard. The Abolitionists are \r 
the only ones with whom I sympathize of the \ 
present extant parties." So he writes to Lor-^ 
ing in November, 1838. 

By this time Lowell was already engaged 
in studying law. This was quite contrary to 
his own desire for a purely literary life. Mr. 
Norton, in his selection of letters, permits 
little light to fall upon this clash of wills. It 
was a time of much restlessness, as is made 
evident chiefly by later reminiscences. E.g: 
(Letters, Vol. i, p. 375, October 25, 1866), "I 
remember in '39 putting a cocked pistol to 
my forehead — and being afraid to pull the 
trigger," etc. The fearless frankness of this 
passage adds double force to Mr. Norton's 
assurance, given us in a happy phrase of the 
preface : " There was nothing in Mr. Lowell's 
life to be concealed or excused." 

The impulse to poetry, however, asserted 
itself irresistibly. The first poem published, 
except some undergraduate effusions, was ap- 



LOWELL 211 

parently '' Threnodia," in the "Knickerbocker" 
for May, 1839. ^^ the letters to Loring are 
always plenty of phrases like this : " I have 
many unfinished pieces in my head, which I 
must finish when I am in the mood." But 
we hear little enough about law, save a recur- 
ring resolve to abandon it. It is, perhaps, an 
illustration of a Puritanic conscientiousness, 
that he did after all finish his two years of 
legal studies, and took his degree in 1840. 
That he practised law there seems to be no 
evidence, save the title of a story, " My First 
Client," printed in the " Knickerbocker," in 
'42, and stigmatized as " pretty poor stuff " 
by its author seven years later. 

More important events about the year '40 
were his engagement to the gentle and gifted 
Maria White, — who greatly strengthened his 
ardor for abolition and reforms in general, — 
and the daring publication of a volume of 
poems. This book, called "A Year's Life," 
won for the young author little general popu- 
larity, but the full respect and interest of 
really competent critics. It practically deter- 
mined his destiny, if this had indeed ever been 



212 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

in doubt. The title may. be a reminiscence of 
Dante's " New Life." Love is the chief harper 
throughout. The prevailing tone, and the 
occasion of the title, may be heard in these 
verses of "A Song" : 

" O moonlight deep and tender, 
A year or more agone 
Your mist of golden splendor 
Round my betrothal shone." 

Less than half the seventy titles have been 
preserved, as " Earlier Poems," in the recent 
editions. Of these I like best ''The Beggar." 
"Rosaline" is as morbid as Poe's "Annabel 
Lee," which it resembles. No one of these 
poems is really famous. Doubtless "My Love" 
is best known. There are in it echoes of Cole- 
ridge's " Genevieve," — especially one unmis- 
takable line, 

" Great feelings hath she of her own," 

hardly an improvement upon 

" Few sorrows hath she of her own." 

In general, these verses were for the most part, 
especially as to form, merely studies in poetry, 



LOWELL 213 

after good masters, by a promising 'prentice 
hand. 

About this time Mr. Lowell's father lost 
much of his property, and the poet was long 
dependent almost entirely upon his own earn- 
ings ; but his poverty was a refined enjoyment of 
simple living, with the loftiest artistic and moral 
aims. His second volume of poems appeared 
in '43, and the rather stiff and pedantic, yet 
learned and witty, " Conversations on Some of 
the Old Poets," in '44. He was marriedJdB-s 
December of the latter year. This delicate 
and spiritual girl, Maria White, was herself a 
gifted writer, and was a constant inspiration 
to her poet. Their married life was a tender 
tragedy only nine years long. All lovers of 
Lowell know the verses, written after a little 
daughter's death, called "The First Snow- 
fall " : 

" Then with eyes that saw not, I kissed her, 
And she, kissing back, could not know, 
That my kiss was given to her sister, 
Folded close under deepening snow." 

Lowell's study windows looked out toward 
the little grave upon the slope of Mount 



214 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

Auburn, and over a picture in the study were 
hung in later days several pairs of worn baby 
shoes. For a second sister was soon laid beside 
the first. The poet's only son, also, is buried in 
Rome, where he died in his second year (1852). 
Mrs. Lowell sank under these fatal blows, and 
followed her children in October, 1853. These 
heavy griefs saddened but could not embitter 
the poet, who in old age could still say : 

"For me Fate gave, whate'er she else denied, 
A nature sloping to the southern side." 

Meantime popularity and fame had come, 
with the appearance of the " Biglow Papers " 
in 1847 2-nd 1848. The latter year marks the 
most wonderful productiveness and versatility 
of Lowell. Besides completing the Hosea 
Biglow series, he wrote the rollicking *' Fable 
for Critics," with its keen, often prophetic, 
characterizations of all prominent American 
authors, including himself. He alsD, in a sort 
of poetic frenzy that lasted forty-eight hours, 
almost without food or sleep, composed the 
*' Vision of Sir Launfal," perhaps the favorite 
among his poems. 



LOWELL 215 

But fame did not bring fortune, nor was 
Lowell destined to devote himself chiefly to 
creative literature. In 1857 he became Long- 
fellow's successor in the Harvard chair of 
modern languages and literature, having first 
spent over two years abroad in hard study, 
chiefly on German, in which he had felt him- 
self to be deficient. This chair he held for 
many years ; indeed, I think he never has had 
a successor. In this same year, 1857, he be- 
came the first editor-in-chief of the new maga- 
zine, the ''Atlantic Monthly." This chair he 
resigned to J. T. Fields in '62, but only to share 
with his friend, C. E. Norton, for some years, 
the control of the still more scholarly " North 
American Review." Many of his college lect- 
ures on literature were elaborated into critical 
essays, and, with others on political and personal 
themes, were afterward gathered up into the 
volumes called " My Study Windows " and 
"Among My Books." 

Though patriotism, humanity, and love still 
inspired their minstrel from time to time, this 
critical, scholarly, and editorial activity was a 
heavy drag upon his poetic wings. Perhaps 



2i6 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

this is illustrated by the fact that his happy 
day at Chartres, in 1855, was not immortalized 
in the noble verses of ** The Cathedral " until 
1868. In the experiences of the war time, 
Lowell had taken an active share, in prose 
and verse. In 1865 he welcomed the return- 
ing heroes at Harvard, and sang Abraham 
Lincoln's praise in splendid verse. The tone 
of this " Commemoration Ode " was recalled in 
1875-1876 by three other noble memorial poems. 
His diplomatic experience lasted from 1877 to 
1884. His popularity in England among all 
classes was such as had never been enjoyed by 
any American before him. Perhaps the great- 
est accomplishment of his life was thus to draw 
nearer together the two greatest branches of 
the Anglo-Saxon race. But if any sane men 
had doubts as to Lowell's loyal Americanism, 
they must have been finally removed by the 
great Harvard oration of 1886. 

There followed a few years of occasional 
poetic activity, but increasingly broken health, 
until his departure from the stage of life — it 
seemed, prematurely — in 1891. Holmes struck 
the note of general feeling in his verse, 



LOWELL 217 

" Thou shouldst have sung the swan-song of the choir," 

for Lowell was generally felt to be, — not only 
the youngest, but, — on the whole, the most 
loftily endowed in all the illustrious group of 
New England singers. 

The Heart of the Singer 

Lowell possessed in full measure the artistic 
nature. The furious rush of inspiration, with 
its wilful eddies and back-currents of indolence 
and procrastination, the impatience and tender 
affection at once lavished upon all the petty, 
confining details of life ; the alternations of self- 
satisfaction and bitter doubt — all these he knew 
full well. They are revealed over and over, 
even in the discreet selections from his friendly 
correspondence only — not from his love let- 
ters — which Mr. Norton has published. But 
the rare flower of genius was planted in a vase 
— to borrow Goethe's phrase — of sturdy Puri- 
tanic manhood. His nerves were steadied and his 
blood purified for him by centuries of virtuous, 
peaceful ancestors. And the man never sur- 
rendered to the genius ; nay, rather, the man's 



2i8 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

sense of duty encroached upon the higher rights 
of the dreamer ! Whenever the note of repin- 
ing is struck, in these frank, healthful letters, 
the regret is over the neglect of that supremest 
and rarest among all his rich gifts — poetic 
inspiration. 

To a little circle of beloved friends, Lowell 
fully revealed himself : it was, indeed, a neces- 
sity for him. Toward the world he was suave, 
mannerly, but after all with a barrier of reserve 
that could not be passed. Doubtless a man like 
Longfellow, conscious that the inner gates are 
safely barred against all humanity, can more 
safely assume the manner of open hospitality to 
all. In these letters we can all see, at least far 
better than before, just how Lowell's work was 
accomplished. To be sure, the most pjecious 
part of the process remains no less a mystery ; 
it is probably always a mystery, even to the 
artist himself. The noble " Commemoration 
Ode," like the "Vision of Sir Launfal," came to 
the poet almost as an instant inspiration, and 
took nearly final shape as fast as he could write 
it down ; yet he had really been collecting the 
material and preparing himself to give it artistic 



LOWELL 



219 



shape throughoi^t his whole life. It was only a 
process like crystallization that was at last so 
suddenly completed. 

Until the memorable year 1847, — when Hosea 
Biglow leaped into sudden fame, — Lowell had 
won his way but slowly, like Hawthorne, to- 
ward the great heart of the people. This is 
not altogether strange. His poems are heav- 
ily, often too heavily, freighted with the results 
both of study and of thought. They are, to be 
sure, the sincere utterance of his soul, but they 
have Hot, as a rule, the simple, unmistakable 
melody of Longfellow or of Whittier. The 
taste for the best things in Lowell's earlier 
work, especially, is usually an acquired taste — 
acquired by loving study and long familiarity 
with him in mature life. Longfellow is oftener 
the companion of boyhood, Whittier the 
trumpet voice that startles our dreaming 
youth. 

Love is a constant element in Lowell's ear- 
lier utterances, at least. Sound morality, per- 
fect trust in God's wisdom and man's future, 
are chords never lacking. There is also, how- 
ever, a vein of mysticism, which often dark- 



220 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

ens, though it does not perturb, the current of 
his thoughts. In this respect he is more Hter- 
ally than elsewhere Emerson's pupil. Thus, 
Emerson, gazing at Concord River, thinks at 
the same time of another stream : truth's current, 
or time, or human life, it may be (for it is by no 
means clear), and he sings : 

" Thy summer voice, Musketaquit, 
Repeats the music of the rain ; 
But sweeter rivers pulsing flit 

Through thee, as thou through Concord Plain." 

("Two Rivers.") 

This fancy is repeated by Lowell more elabo- 
rately in " Beaver Brook," and still again as he 
muses on his beloved Charles, in the " Indian 
Summer Reverie " : 

" Flow on, dear river ; not alone you flow 

To outward sight, and through your marshes wind ; 
Fed from the mystic springs of long ago, 

Your twin flows silent through my world of mind." 

To be sure, this perception of an analogy 
between an outward vision and a spiritual 
reality is not only the very essence of mysti- 
cism, but also, as Emerson, Longfellow, and 
Lowell all tell us, of poetry itself as well. 



Lowell 221 

In the same way, Emerson's " Forerunners " 
expresses a feeling common to all poets, — per- 
haps to all men, — that our rarest and swiftest 
thoughts still elude our grasp : 

"No speed of mine avails 
To hunt upon their shining trails." 

But Lowell could hardly have failed to re- 
member his master's very words, when compos- 
ing his " Envoi to the Muse " : 

" I seem to fold thy luring shape, 
And vague air to my bosom clasp, 
Thou lithe, perpetual Escape." 

Indeed, here, and in Whittier's " Vanishers," 
the similarity in words, and even in metre, 
appears to be a loyal confession of indebted- 
ness ; for within this generous-hearted band 
there are no mean jealousies or concealments. 

Lowell's poetry always continued to be en- 
riched by echoes and allusions from earlier 
singers. Often, indeed, this is frankly avowed, 
as when, beginning '' Sir Launfal " with the 
words, 

" Not only around our infancy, 
Doth Heaven with all its splendors lie," 



2 22 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

he alludes plainly to Wordsworth's greatest 
ode on -' Recollections of Immortality." But 
Lowell is in no sense a plagiarist, nor even 
vitally indebted, as Longfellow so constantly is, 
to other literatures. All he says comes warm 
from his own throbbing heart. He may borrow 
a word or phrase to utter himself, just because 
his scholar's memory has held and loved it, but 
he could have shaped his own expression at 
least as well. Often, in moments of deepest 
feeling, he strikes out a rugged, vigorous 
phrase, such as Longfellow's more silvery 
chime never strikes. This is especially well 
seen by comparing Longfellow's " Two Angels," 
written on the day Lowell's wife died, 

" And softly from that hushed and darkened room 
Two angels issued where but one went in," 

and the stricken poet's own " After the 

Burial " : 

" It is pagan ; but wait till you feel it, — 
That jar of our earth, that dull shock 
When the ploughshare of deeper passion 
Tears down to our primitive rock." 

It may be said that here Lowell was the 
sufferer, and naturally spoke from the heart. 



LOWELL 223 

But that only points more sharply the differ- 
ence in the two artists. Longfellow, after a 
similarly bitter bereavement, waited in silence 
eigJiteen years, and then wrote a tender and 
graceful sonnet, laying it away for his own eyes 
only ! In fact, Longfellow uttered in tasteful 
verse almost every human emotion, except his 
own elemental feelings. There is but one 
slight love-note, for a living woman, in all his 
verse (cf. p. 135). 

Among Lowell's close personal attachments, 
this intimacy with Longfellow is perhaps the 
most important. A century hence, this gener- 
ous friendship may have become as prominent 
in the story of New England literature as is to- 
day, in our oldest home, the tie that bound 
together the poet-pair of Weimar. 

Indeed, these two loyal friends, Longfellow 
the gentle, and impetuous Lowell, seem to me 
beyond question our two most important poets. 
Every mature American should have read all 
their works repeatedly. But while the tender 
sentiment, the broad human sympathy, even 
the sunny, genial scholarship of Longfellow 
might make a child think (most untruly) that 



224 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

he has mastered the full meaning, there is 
much in Lowell's verse which will utterly baffle 
us until our own deeper joys and sorrows fur- 
nish the key. Indeed, there will always be 
acute educated men (perhaps women, too) who 
will declare half his verses unintelligible to 
them. His own father was one such critic. 
Lowell is often essentially untranslatable, 
nor can his meaning be expressed at all in 
prose : a test Longfellow rarely resists so 
stubbornly. 

As an artist in the technique of verse, in the 
combination of organ-like harmonies of sound, 
Lowell, when at his best, is unrivalled in 
America, and sometimes near to imperial 
Tennyson. Let him who thinks these words 
extravagant read, for instance, aloud, the twenty 
opening lines of " Sir Launfal " : 

" Over his keys the musing organist, 
Beginning doubtfully and far away, 
First lets his lingers wander as they list, 

And builds a bridge from Dreamland for his lay." 

A loftier music still is often heard in the 
''Harvard Ode," e.g.: 



LOWELL 225 

" Our slender life runs rippling by, and glides 
Into the silent hollow of the Past ; 
What is there that abides 

To make the next age better than the last?" 

And precisely these two poems were essen- 
tially improvisations, struck off at a white heat, 
and almost at a sitting ! Lowell does not 
always choose words so smooth gliding as those 
just quoted. The tones of the whirlwind, the 
surf, and the thunder are not those of the brook 
or the rain ; but all are nature's voices. The 
severest test of this harmonic power is blank 
verse. Here Longfellow's " Divine Tragedy " 
often breaks down altogether into rugged prose, 
while " The Cathedral " need not fear compari- 
son, at least in part, with the 

" God-gifted organ voice of England, 
Milton, a name to resound for ages." 

Indeed, there are not a few passages of 
"The Cathedral" which ring a clear and un- 
mistakable challenge upon the Miltonic shield 
itself. We may choose almost at a venture : 

" His holy places may not be of stone, 
Nor made with hands, yet fairer far than aught 
By artist feigned or pious ardor reared, 

Q 



226 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

Fit altars for who guards inviolate 

God's chosen seat, the sacred form of man." 

One almost remembers these stately, slow- 
marching lines upon a /page of " Paradise 
Lost " ! It is interesting to note that Lowell, 
the most fastidious of critics, prone enough to 
self-dissatisfaction in all else, defends with un- 
failing confidence the metrical skill, the ear for 
harmonies, of Lowell the poet. 

One quality, the one for which he is perhaps 
now the most famous, Lowell had hardly shown 
at all until the memorable year 1847. I mean, 
humor. That the Yankee has an abundance of 
the same dry, serious humor as the Scotchman, 
with much more self-consciousness and quiet 
enjoyment therein, is now very generally under- 
stood. (Though indeed Andrew Lang, Louis 
Stevenson, Barrie, and the other canny young 
Scots have nearly destroyed our belief in the 
incapacity of the Scotch to enjoy their own 
fun. The Yankee, at any rate, fully appre- 
ciates himself !) One of the closest and quietest 
studies of New England rural life, a half cen- 
tury ago, may be found in Hawthorne's Ameri- 
can Notebooks, and it is remarked there that 



LOWELL 227 

humor is a luiiversal Yankee trait. The Hosea 
Biglow of the famous papers is in dialect, man- 
ners, etc., the typical Yankee ; but of course 
his wit is such as no other Yankee, save the 
poet Lowell, could have furnished. The very 
first paper made a great hit, and presently all 
the country was buzzing with the refrain of 

"John P. 
Robinson, he . . . 
Says they didn't know everything down in Judee." 

The circumstances were happily prepared for 
such an explosion of enthusiasm. New Eng- 
land was bitterly opposed to the war with Mex- 
ico, which was really waged to secure wider 
territory for the spread of slavery. Whittier, 
like Lowell, had long been identified with the 
Abolitionists, but his poetry in their behalf had 
also been of the most earnest and strenuous 
character. There were ludicrous and extrava- 
gant figures among the Abolitionists, not to 
mention Abby Folsom, whom Emerson called 
" the flea of conventions." The laugh had 
always been against the reformers : now for the 
first time it was on their side. Of course, even 



228 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

now, the mirth excited was of a rather grim 
and sardonic sort. Mr. Robinson was himself 
an inoffensive man, unluckily caught out in the 
storm on the wrong side of this question. He 
is said to have fled to Europe, and finally to 
Malta, or even to Egypt, only to hear his own 
name chanted hilariously by strangers in the 
shadow of the Pyramids. 

When the first of the " Biglow Papers " 
appeared, the remark of Charles Sumner was, 
that it was a pity the poem was not "written 
in the English language." Lowell himself 
afterward regretted the needlessly bad spell- 
ing, but held out stoutly for the antiquity and 
the poetic fitness of many *' vulgarisms " and 
provincialisms charged against him. The end- 
ing *'in'" — for "ing" — he defended espe- 
cially as really more musical, though the pro- 
lessor and ambassador did not employ it in 
his own conversation ! Many critics fully agree 
with Mr. Sumner's regret, at least as to a few 
of the poems. In the second series especially, 
Written during the Civil War, several are 
dignified and even tragic, or rather elegiac, 
in tone. Here one can feel nothing fitting 



LOWELL 229 

in the "lingo," Nearly all the peculiarities 
of pronunciation, though perhaps not all the 
rarer words, are still perfectly familiar in 
many parts of New England. The dialect 
adds a realistic flavor to the real drollery of 
the lighter pieces ; but it seems quite out of 
place where the patriot poet is celebrating the 
heroism of his martyr nephew, the heroic 
General Charles Russell Lowell : 

" What's words to them whose faith and truth 
On War's red touchstone rang true metal, 
Who ventured life and love and youth 
For the great prize of death in battle ? " 

This quotation insists upon retranslating it- 
self into "the English language," in which it 
was evidently composed ! Lowell's friend and 
biographer, Francis H. Underwood, has evi- 
dently had the same feeling, when he quotes 
the strong lines written to remind England of 
the War of 1812 : 

" I recollect how sailor's rights were won, 
Yard locked in yard, hot gunlip kissing gun. 



230 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

Better that all our ships and all their crews 
Should sink to rot in ocean's dreamless ooze, 
****** 
Than seek such peace as only cowards crave ; 
Give me the peace of dead men or of brave ! " 

The rustic dialect never coins phrases like 
" ocean's dreamless ooze ! " But while we share 
Sumner's feeling, that some at least of these 
noble war lyrics should have been rescued 
from dialect, we regret still more deeply that 
we have not many another such bit of Yankee 
feeling and tenderness as " Suthin' in the Pas- 
toral Line." We may defy any one to " trans- 
late " such verses as, 

" Once git a smell o' musk into a draw ' " . . . 

Lowell left unwritten, so to speak, a collection 
of tales in verse which he was intending to 
call "The Nooning." One only, " Fitz-Adams' 
Story," saw the light. That one has more of 
the local color, the wit, the homely feeling 
of old New England than can be gathered 
from all the graceful pages of the "Wayside 
Inn." 

Lowell's best poetic utterance is generally 



LOWELL 231 

felt to mark our highest achievement in verse 
hitherto ; but his poems are uneven, in the 
artistic sense often unfinished. Some of them, 
indeed, were prematurely printed before the 
vein of thought had worked itself out. 

It is not incredible, then, that the call of 
patriotism has indeed deprived us of our rarest 
poet's unuttered master-song. If so, the more 
precious and memorable for us all should be 
the costly lesson of his life. 



Nor aims at that clear-ethered height 
Whither the brave deed climbs for light." 



VII 

HOLMES 
The Last Leaf 

The recent departure of the Autocrat has 
brought freshly to the minds of us all the long 
peaceful career of this last survivor from the 
Round Table. It is a strange coincidence, at 
least, that from Bryant's birth to Holmes' death 
( 1 794-1 894) was a hundred years to a month : 
a century which precisely includes the lives of 
our six most famous poets. 

The gambrel-roofed house, close to Cambridge 
Common and the College yard, in which Dr. 
Holmes saw the light, most appropriately, on 
Commencement Day of 1809, was still standing 
until a dozen years ago. The new Gymnasium 
and Law School of the University displaced 
it at last. A few years later the Autocrat speaks 
of the well as alone remaining to mark the site. 
Perhaps that, too, has vanished. It is generally 
supposed the old house was pulled down about 
232 



HOLMES 233 

1884. It is to be hoped the Autocrat died in 
that behef. As a matter of fact, however, the 
venerable abode of the race was cut into several 
sections, by a thrifty purchaser, hauled to the 
river side, and there doubtless it stands to-day, 
still unmistakable in its ignominy, tenanted by at 
least a half-dozen wretched families of various 
colors and races. Books, like men, "have a 
doom of their own," as Horace says, and Holmes 
has echoed it most effectively in his prelude : 

" O sexton of the alcoved tomb, 

Where souls in leathern cerements lie. 
Tell me each living poet's doom! 

How long before his book shall die?" 

But even he would hardly have had the heart 
to sing, in gaiety or earnest, the real fate of the 
house of the Holmes family ! 

The author's earliest memories of the spot 
are gathered up in the first number of '^The 
Poet at the Breakfast Table," which .should be 
read with Lowell's merrier '' Cambridge Thirty 
Years Ago." Like Lowell and Emerson, 
Holmes was the son of a Congregationalist 
clergyman, a learned but not a witty man. It 



234 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

is said of the Autocrat, as of his younger towns- 
man, that his poetic vein and his wit must have 
been inherited wholly from his mother. 

At the dame's school of his childhood, Mar- 
garet Fuller and the second Richard H. Dana 
(who later spent '' Two Years before the Mast ") 
were among his mates. His last school year 
was passed at the Phillips Academy in Ando- 
ver ; and in 1867 a visit to these early haunts 
produced the sheaf of reminiscences called 
" Cinders from the Ashes." "The ghost of a 
boy was at my side as I wandered among the 
places he knew so well." But when at the 
station the elderly man called for two tickets to 
Boston, "the little ghost whispered, 'When 
you leave this place, you leave me behind 
you.' " Eleven years later, for the centennial 
of the famous Academy, these early memories 
were again recorded in verse : 

" I, whose fresh voice yon red-faced temple knew, 
What tune is left me, fit to sing to you ? 
. . . Much could I tell you, that you know too well. 
Much I remember, but I will not tell." . . . 

(Mr. Aldrich is not the only self-confessed 
Bad Boy in the Atlantic circle.) This clashing 



HOLMES 235 

heroic couplet, by the way, the favorite of 
Dryden, Pope, and Goldsmith, was almost a 
part of Dr. Holmes' poetic second * nature his 
whole life through. He began, indeed, to use 
it as a boy at Andover, in a metrical version 
from Virgil which is still preserved. 

He entered Harvard at sixteen, and gradu- 
ated without mishap, as all the world knows, 
in the class of 1829. Even in college he pub- 
lished some verses now famous, especially, 
"The Height of the Ridiculous": 

" I wrote some lines once on a time 
In wondrous merry mood,". . . . 

and at graduation he was chosen Class Poet. 
This " merry mood " lasted, on the whole, 
through life, and in one of his most impres- 
sive farewells, — which were happily as numer- 
ous as Patti's, — ■ I mean " The Iron Gate," read 
for a breakfast given on his seventieth birthday, 
he says : 

"I come not here your morning hour to sadden, 
A hmping pilgrim, leaning on my staff, 
I, who have never deemed it sin to gladden 
This vale of sorrows with a wholesome laugh." 



236 ■ THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

In these college verses indeed we see little 
purpose further than to raise an idle laugh. 
But the man and the poet awoke suddenly in 
full earnest when, in 1830, it was jDroposed to 
break up the frigate '' Constitution," popularly 
known as '' Old Ironsides." Every American 
schoolboy shouted the lines : 

"Ay, tear her tattered ensign down!" 

written almost upon the instant by the youth 
of twenty-one, and published a day or two 
later in the " Boston Advertiser." They were 
copied everywhere, and were not only suc- 
cessful in their immediate purpose, but gave 
their author national fame at a single bound. 
These verses have still the place of honor 
at the opening of the standard editions of his 
poems. A recent article in '* St. Nicholas " 
gives interesting information upon the present 
whereabouts and condition of " Old Iron- 
sides." 

We shall have more to say of Holmes' 
humor ; but it is well to remember that this 
first great triumph was the clear, earnest cry 
of a patriotic heart. So the poet's own fa- 



HOLMES 237 

vorite, *' The Chambered Nautilus," " The 
Voiceless," and many another masterpiece, 
even the Prelude " To My Readers," are 
wholly serious, almost sad. In the ability to 
bridge the narrow, but deep and dangerous, 
rift that parts humor from pathos. Holmes 
has, perhaps, no superior since Hood. He 
resents the suspicion that he is merely a 
jester more sharply than any other charge 
against himself. The singer is a true knight : 

" Think not I come in manhood''s fiery noon, 
To steal his laurels from the stage buffoon. 
His sword of lath the harlequin may wield ; ' 
Behold the star upon my lifted shield ! " 

For a year Holmes studied law, but this he 
abandoned more promptly than Lowell did 
later, and found his proper career in medicine. 
If we add the theological influences of his 
father's home, he thus combined an insight into 
all the three learned professions, which was hap- 
pily utilized in the most successful of his three 
novels, **The Guardian Angel." After two 
years' study of medicine at home, he spent 
three years abroad, chiefly in the schools and 
hospitals of Paris. Doubtless this French ex- 



238 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

perience intensified the clear-cut crispness and 
directness of Holmes' style, especially in verse. 
Of direct reminiscence there is not so much. 
"La Grisette," though Parisian in setting, has 
little of the Beranger flavor, save in its title. 
His welcome to Prince Napoleon, in 1861, with 
its **Vive la France!" has, perhaps, more 
warmth of feeling than most among his nu- 
merous songs of welcome and farewell. There 
are many recollections of these youthful years 
in the account of another pilgrimage, half a cen- 
tury later, " Our Hundred Days in Europe." 

The year of his return, 1836, was an impor- 
tant one. He took his degree of M.D. at Har- 
vard. He read his first long poem, " Poetry, a 
Metrical Essay," before the Phi Beta Kappa in 
August ; and he published a volume of poems, 
among which this '' Metrical Essay " was the 
chief. The very title, like the metre and the 
style, recalled Dryden and Pope. His rapid 
couplets here ring all the changes of feeling 

^' From grave to gay, from lively to severe," 

though indeed Holmes never can be really 
severe, very long, save when attacking rigid 



HOLMES 239 

Calvinism in theology, or homoeopathy in medi- 
cine; and even then the jest breaks through, 
just when his sternness begins to trouble us. 

The connection of parts in this and in other 
sustained flights of Dr. Holmes' muse often 
baffles us. The clearness and completeness are 
always there — in the couplet or the stanza. 
His genius is distinctly lyrical. When he 
ventures beyond a hundred lines, on a single 
theme, his wings sag, or his course veers. As 
with his friend Emerson, the part is here some- 
times more than the whole. 

It might be supposed that poetry would have 
interfered with the young physician's success ; 
but it was not so. Besides practising medicine 
in Boston, he wrote, during 1 836-1 837, medical 
essays which won three or four medals, offered 
as prizes in those years. Dr. Holmes has 
always had plenty of time ! 

After two years as Professor of Anatomy and 
Physiology at Dartmouth (the famous " small 
college " which Daniel Webster's plea had 
saved), Holmes returned to practise medicine 
in Boston, and to marry, in 1840. His position 
in the '* best society " was never questioned. 



240 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

His liking for the good things of life is con- 
fessed delightfully in "Contentment": 

" Little I ask ; my wants are few ; 
I only wish a hut of stone 
{A very plain brown stone will do), 
... I care not much for gold or land ; 

Give me a mortgage here and there ; 
Some good bank-stock, some note of hand, 

Or trifling railroad share, — 
I only ask that Fortune send 
A little more than I shall spend." 

He did not imperil his comfort by any prema- 
ture devotion to abolition, or other unfashiona- 
ble causes ; indeed, there is a curious allusion 
to John Quincy Adams' gallant stand in his old 
age: 

" Chiefs of New England ! by your sires' renown, 
Dash the red torches of the rebel down ! 
Flood his black hearthstone till its flames expire, 
Though your old Sachem fanned his council-fire ! " 

Here the "rebel" is the Abolitionist! Not 
that Holmes was ever lacking in frankness or 
courage. Fortunately for the reformers them- 
selves, conservatism will always be in the 
majority; and Dr. Holmes was a natural con- 



HOLMES 



241 



servative in many things besides his love of the 
heroic couplet. 

In 1847 he accepted a professorship in the 
Harvard Medical School, and for thirty-five 
years gave there his four weekly lectures, re- 
signing in 1882. His lectures were as clear and 
interesting in themselves as the subject would 
permit, and illustrated with such wealth of anec- 
dote and ludicrous allusion as no other demon- 
strator of anatomy ever had at his command. 

In 185 1 appeared the first of his many 
poems for the class of '29. The next year he 
began a successful career as "lyceum" orator, 
with a coijrse on English poets of the nine- 
teenth century. This was in the golden days 
of the lyceum, and this course in particular had 
much of that consecutiveness which we claim 
as a cardinal virtue in University Extension. 
His favorite subjects appear to have been Scott, 
Byron, Keats, Shelley, Moore,, and in a less de- 
gree, Wordsworth. He had a delightful habit of 
closing each lecture with a poem upon the poet 
he had discussed. Of these, the most loftily 
inspired is, without question, me elegy describ- 
ing the drowning of Shelley, the finding of the 



242 THE NEW ENGLAND FOETS 

body, with a volume of his friend Keats' poems 
thrust, opened, into his bosom ; the burning of 
the corpse on the ItaUan shore, and the deposit- 
ing of his ashes beside Keats' grave in the 
famous Httle Protestant cemetery at Rome. 
The closing plea against hasty denial of the 
divine grace for the anti-Christian poet is es- 
pecially beautiful. Each quatrain of this poem 
demands a picture to illustrate it, though I do 
not know that it has ever been so published. 

And now we once again approach the year 
which drew all these gifted New Englanders 
more closely about the Round Table of the 
Atlantic. Lowell, it will be remembered, was 
made editor-in-chief, with enthusiastic unanim- 
ity, when the new magazine was started in the 
autumn of 1857. His first condition was, that 
Holmes should be a leadirfg contributor. The 
two were then already tfee most famous wits of 
American letters ; but Lowell, though not yet 
forty, had ten years before leaped into popular- 
ity with Hosea Biglow, and also won supremacy 
among the critics by his slashing Fable for the 
guild ; while Holmes at fifty, a prosperous 
physician and popular professor, was in litera- 



HOLMES 243 

ture little more than a welcome writer of occa- 
sional verse. 

The late and sudden flowering of his prose 
genius is as wonderful as anything in his career. 
In three successive years of the magazine ap- 
peared the first two delightful volumes of 
"Table Talk," and the powerful novel, "Elsie 
Venner." After half a dozen years' rest came 
in rapid succession his happiest novel, "The 
Guardian Angel," and, in 1871, the third 
"Breakfast Table" book, "The Poet." The plan 
of these three volumes of table talk is so flexible, 
that everything is " in order," except, indeed, a 
motion to adjourn ; for it is not easy to lay the 
book down, though it is really much better 
read piecemeal and thoughtfully. There is not 
much dramatic characterization in the conversa- 
tion. We rarely hear any voices but Holmes' 
own ; yet this one voice, in prose as in song, 
has " many keys " ; sweeps, indeed, almost the 
whole gamut of human feeling and experience. 
Those of us not blessed with a keen sense of 
the ludicrous will miss much of the best in 
these books ; but not all by any means. It is 
breakfast a la carte, and he is hard indeed 



244 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

to please who cannot find much both tooth- 
some and strengthening. 

In still another field of letters Dr. Holmes 
was to win laurels, though not the loftiest. His 
biography of Motley, the historian, appeared in 
1879, that of Emerson in 1884. If anything 
was still lacking to prove his versatility, we 
might mention an impressive oration delivered 
to Bostonians in the dark days of 1863, insist- 
ing that the war must now go on to the end, even 
though that end should be the utter destruction 
of our people and civilization. 

My last remembrance, as indeed numberless 
Harvard men's, of Holmes and Lowell, is as 
poet and orator at the great Anniversary in 
1886. Dr. Holmes' hair was already snow 
white, as Lowell reminded him with tender play- 
fulness, later in the day. But for years longer 
the little Autocrat was as familiar a street figure 
to Bostonians as the stately form of Phillips 
Brooks or the gaunt shape of Edward Everett 
Hale. His summers were spent in his pretty 
cottage on the favorite " North Shore," at Bev- 
erly. The inevitable end of the cheerful life 
tale need not be recalled. 



HOLMES 245 

It has been attempted to follow, thus far, a 
chronological outline of biography. A pleasant 
final task remains : to recall the charm of Dr. 
Holmes' literary work. The traits unmistaka- 
ble in it are swift versatility, a crisp sim- 
plicity and grace, depth of earnest thought, 
but above all a merry, ever-present wit and 
humor. Holmes' medical writings, of course, 
lie outside our field ; so, indeed, strictly speak- 
ing, do his two essays in biography, though that 
of Emerson is indispensable to our knowledge 
of both author and subject. It is amusing to 
see that Holmes, who was as little of a mystic as 
any true poet can be, seems to share in some 
degree the popular estimate of "Brahma," 
which many, at least, if not all faithful Em- 
ersonians place near the head of his verses : 
*' To the average Western mind it is the near- 
est approach to a Torricellian vacuum that lan- 
guage can pump out of itself." 

To the three famous volumes of table talk, 
a fourth, greatly inferior in power, " Over the 
Teacups," was added in his last years. The 
passage which will be remembered longest is 
the thrilling picture of the writer's sensations 



246 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

in advanced age : " At fifty, your vessel is 
staunch, and you are on deck with the rest in 
all weathers. At sixty, the vessel still floats, 
and you are in the cabin. At seventy, you 
with a few fellow-passengers are on a raft. At 
eighty, you are on a spar to which, possibly 
one, or two, or three friends of about your own 
age are still clinging." The yet more pathetic 
close of the paragraph need not be cited. 

The opinion that Dr. Holmes' romances are 
chiefly breakfast-table chats still, is, I think, 
just, and, indeed, the general judgment of 
critics; but I am writing when fresh from a 
reperusal of them, and so am, happily, no critic. 
Their charm is so great and many-sided, that 
it is hard indeed to find any fault zvhile you 
read. But there really are long stretches of 
monologue by the professor, while the story 
waits. The main plot is not skilfully woven, 
and does not show much originality. Indeed, 
in *'The Guardian Angel," the heroine's fort- 
une is restored to her by so hackneyed a device 
as the long-lost will, which the villain finds by 
accident, conceals while he strives to win her 
hand, and thinks he destroys before her eyes 



HOLMES 247 

when rejected. Of course, it is only a copy. 
The real document is safe in the honest part- 
ner's hands — and all ends happily ! Dr. 
Holmes himself knew how to ridicule this sort 
of thing, at least upon the boards, deliciously, 
as we may see in the -Prologue : 

'^'The world's a stage/ — as Shakspeare said one day; 
The stage a world — was what he meant to say. 
The outside world's a blunder, that is clear ; 
The real world that Nature meant is here. 
Here every foundling finds its lost mamma ; 
Each rogue, repentant, melts his stern papa ; 
Misers relent, the spendthrift's debts are paid, 
The cheats are taken in the traps they laid ; 
One after one the troubles all are past. 
Till the fifth act comes right side up at last ; 
When the young couple, old folks, rogues, and all 
Join hands, so happy, at the curtain's fall." 

But in truth the chief value of these stories 
is to be sought elsewhere than in plot and con- 
struction. " Elsie Venner " is a rather grew- 
some account of a human being, changed in 
nature before her birth by the venom of a 
rattlesnake. Even this strange medical prob- 
lem is of interest to the wise physician chiefly 
because behind it he sees a larger ethical 



248 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

question. As he says in a second preface : 
" Wherein lies the difference between her 
position at the bar of judgment, human or 
divine, and that of the unfortunate victim, 
who received a moral poison from a remote 
ancestor before he drew his first breath?" 
Not a promising beginning for an enjoyable 
romance, you say, — if you do not know your 
author. Yet it is as fascinating as anything 
of Rider Haggard's, and a thousand-fold more 
profitable to read. In passing, it may be said 
that one of the most delightful elements is 
the broad flavor of rustic Yankeeism, culmi- 
nating in Major Sprowle's party. "Silas Peck- 
ham," the schoolmaster, is a merciless satire 
on the worst form of New England shrewd- 
ness and thrift. Students of the dialect will 
find here helpful additions to the vocabulary 
of Hosea Biglow. 

"The Guardian Angel" treats the problem 
of heredity in a far more normal and pleasanter 
example. Myrtle Hazard, like every human 
being, is the complex result of many ancestral 
lives and natures. Through the eyes of the 
old doctor in the story, who in his ninety years 



HOLMES 249 

has studied five generations of her race, we see 
a succession of her inherited traits rise to the 
surface and imperil her womanly life, until her 
own essentially healthy and noble nature comes 
safely to its own. 

The last romance, " A Mortal Antipathy," is 
a far less serious and less powerful illustration 
of a kindred problem : the enduring force of 
impressions made upon the mind in early 
infancy. 

We must pass to the poetry of • Holrnes. 
He is doubtless most widely known as pure 
humorist. *' The September Gale," " The Dea- 
con's One Hoss Shay," '' How the Old Horse 
Won the Bet," ''The Broomstick Train," usu- 
ally come first to our minds. Nor is this alto- 
gether unreasonable on our part. Holmes' 
most unique gift to literature is his pure fun 
and wit. But it is actually a gift to literaUire : 
that is, it appears, often, at least, as an insepa- 
rable element in the composition of enduring 
masterpieces, which, of course, possess other 
and higher qualities. Even the '* One Hoss 
Shay " itself could only have been written by a 
master of sentiment and pathos. Where else 



250 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

do we hear so effectively indicated the terrible 
gliding, slipping, passing of the years, the 
ceaseless flight of time ? 

" Colts grew horses, beards turned gray, 
Deacon and deaconess dropped away, 
Children and grandchildren — where were they? 
But there stood the wonderful one hoss shay 
As fresh as on Lisbon-earthquake-day. 
. . . Little of all we value here 
Wakes on the morn of its hundredth year 
Without both feeling and looking queer." 

Indeed, we may say of the entire poem, that 
full as it is of humor, and even of fun, yet 
there is method and art and deepest pathos in't 
no less. 

There is much more pure fun in Holmes' 
poetic output than in Lowell's. *' Hosea Big- 
low," especially, never allows us to forget his 
purpose, to drive home a moral lesson, or even 
to aid the political cause which he thought the 
cause of righteousness as well. Dr. Holmes 
himself truly describes his friend, 

" Whose play is all earnest, whose wit is the edge 
(With a beetle behind) of a sham-splitting wedge." 



HOLMES 251 

"The Courtin'," again, is pure pathos, in a 
homely setting, and leaves us, at best, very- 
like his heroine, 

" Kind o' smily round the lips, 
And teary round the lashes." 

Indeed, Lowell's really aimless fun, on the 
rare occasions when it appears, is the mirth of 
the scholar quite as often as of the Yankee. 
We may instance the piece written for a Har- 
vard Commencement dinner, which is largely 
unintelligible save to college men, and even 
drops into Greek for a moment. The same 
remark is at least partly true of the delicious 
epitaph upon the brothers Snow, oystermen, 
in " Cambridge Thirty Years Since," culminat- 
ing in an exquisitely ludicrous citation from 
Horace, " Jam satis nivis ! " (enough of snow !). 

But Holmes' fun was a very large part of his 
nature, and quite able to stand alone, in prose 
or verse. Not to repeat names of poems al- 
ready mentioned, "The Ballad of the Young 
Oysterman," " Evening, by a Tailor," and 
plenty more are quite safe from any moral 
application. Single lines and stanzas from 



252 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

many of his poems have been made proverbial 
by their very grotesqueness, e.g. : 

" And silence, like a poultice., comes 
To heal the wounds of sound." 

Sometimes, in mock-dignified language, he 
alludes to a most familiar rhyme or bit of slang : 

'' Like the filial John, 
Whom sleep surprised with half his drapery on." 

Fond as he is of the dignified heroic couplet, 
he will make it sing of things that would have 
shocked — not alone manly Dryden or precise 
Pope, but — even poor rollicking Noll Gold- 
smith. For instance, when he has received a 
'* Modest Request " for a speech, a song, and a 
toast, all on the same occasion, he is reminded 
of the thirsty sailor : 

" ' Jack,' said my lady, ' is it grog you'll try, 
Or punch, or toddy, if perhaps you're dry ? ' 
' Ah,' said the sailor, '■ though I can't refuse, 
You know, my lady, 'taint for me to choose — 
I'll take the grog to finish off my lunch, 
And drink the toddy — while you mix the punch.'" 

This element of drollery, I repeat, is essential 
to our appreciation of the real Holmes. No 



HOLMES 253 

less essential, surely, is the pure pathos and 
lofty aspiration of his religious and imaginative 

verse : 

" Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul, 

As the swift seasons roll ! 

Leave thy low-vaulted past ! 
Let each new temple, nobler than the last, 
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast. 

Till tliou at lengtli art free, 
Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea!" 

In a fev^ poems, such as *'The Voiceless," we 
seem to hear the drip of the author's very life- 
blood in the verse : 

" O hearts that break and give no sign, 
Save whitening lip and fading tresses, 
Till Death pours out his cordial wine, 

Slow-dropped from Misery's crushing presses ! " 

But the complete charm of the poet is felt 
where these two elements, seemingly so diverse, 
are most completely fused. Perhaps the most 
perfect example of what is meant will be found 
in the poem, almost too familiar to be quoted 
here, which was the special favorite of Abra- 
ham Lincoln. Indeed, it is said that the great 
emancipator once gained his case, as counsel for 



2 54 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

a persecuted old man, by quoting the famous 
fourth stanza : 

" The mossy marbles rest 
On the lips that he has pressed 
In their bloom." 

Strangest of all it seems, that Dr. Holmes him- 
self should have lingered for sixty years to 
realize in full at last the prophetic closing 
stanza : 

" And if I should Hve to be 
The last leaf upon the tree." . . . 



VIII 
RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT 

Lowell, in his late essay called " Progress 
of the World," says of man : " He is a social 
animal, that is, an animal liable in various 
ways to make his neighbor uncomfortable." 
Perhaps those who think the Yankee the 
coldest and most unsocial of mankind, — even 
those who love him least or love him not at 
all, — would still include him heartily within 
this definition of humanity ! 

Physically, intellectually, morally, the Puritan 
is aggressive. He has colonized the great North- 
west, or at least claims to have guided and 
moulded the colonizing masses. He has taken 
the lead in recasting and liberalizing the reli- 
gious, the political, and the literary ideals of 
the common fatherland during the century 
now closing. He has played, or is playing, a 
prominent part, in particular, in that twofold 
255 



256 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

agitation for human freedom which is yet 
only half successful, — if even so much. The 
sectional enslavement of black men has be- 
come illegal. The universal improvement and 
uplifting of the laboring masses is hardly 
even yet faced squarely, as the Sphinx of our 
generation. 

Garrison and PhilHps, Sumner and Whittier, 
all so irreconcilable as opponents, and sharply 
critical even of each other, were all Yankees. 
In the untiring cry of the impracticable Mug- 
wump, as in the shriek of the Abolitionist, the 
nasal twang of the Northeast is still predomi- 
nant. And of those, born or unborn, who 
shall lead the way, through ridicule and per- 
secution, to the serious struggle and the final 
victory which is assured, though not, of 
course, in any form we now dream, for a 
Christian Socialism, a truer Brotherhood of 
Man, — it is a safe forecast that New Eng- 
land birth, or ancestry, will be the rule rather 
than the exception. We shall still welcome 
the George Thompsons and Harriet Martineaus 
of every land to the front ranks of danger 
and strife. But already far away in the future 



RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT 257 

we hear the Yankee emigrant's hymn set to 
a new meaning; and when the song shall be 
raised anew, 

" We cross the prairies, as of old 
Our fathers crost the sea. 
To make the West as they the East 
The homestead of the Free," 

though it may be woman rather than man that 
leads in the clearest treble, it will surely still be 

" Entuned in hire nose ful semylie ! " 

The popular poets and historians of New 
England stock have all died or grown old too 
early to be identified largely with the new 
moral and social ferment which we see about 
us. (Our beloved and ever-youthful colonel, 
T. W. H., should of course be excepted.) 
Even in the chief struggles of the first and 
second thirds of our century, for Liberality 
in religious thought and Liberation of the 
African slaves, these literary men's names 
are not those which come first to the lips. 
Emerson in purely religious speculation was 
perhaps merely the greatest disciple of Chan- 



258 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

ning, and Whittier is overshadowed as an 
Abolitionist by Garrison, possibly by Phillips 
and one or two others. Indeed, both Longfel- 
low and Hawthorne, as well as Holmes, were 
conservative by instinct, and reluctant reform- 
ers at best. But, at least, such lives illustrate 
strikingly that the Puritan is above all a man 
of the firmest moral conscientiousness, and 
that even when he develops the fullest artistic 
sense of the beautiful he is none the less an 
ethical teacher. " Beauty is virtue, ugliness is 
sin," is their reversible creed, as voiced by the 
simplest and most serious of them all, Whit- 
tier, the Quaker. 

The work of this group includes the greater 
part of the purely literary productions in 
America which can claim to have enriched 
appreciably the book of the world's life : the 
chief addenda being the " Sketchbook," the 
poetry of Bryant, perhaps of Poe, and the great 
romance '' Uncle Tom's Cabin." Yet the gen- 
eral result of any thoughtful review, such as I 
have here attempted, must be helpful (as Mr. 
Barrett Wendell has remarked before me) rather 
to modesty than to pride. 



RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT 259 

In particular, it is clear that no great epic 
or drama has yet been created upon our soil. 
Indeed, in these larger fields of poetry we are 
scarcely represented at all. And while nearly 
all our best verse is thus limited by its lyrical 
form, so our one great author of romance is mas- 
ter rather of psychological insight than of con- 
structive creation. Hawthorne hardly reveals 
for us a world teeming with a life of its own, 
as Scott, or George Eliot, or Dickens, did. A 
comparison of the '' Scarlet Letter " with 
" Henry Esmond," or even with " Lorna 
Doone," may indicate more plainly the lack 
we feel. Hawthorne has bidden us gaze, far 
more deeply than quaintly gentle Blackmore 
or half-tender, half-cynical Thackeray, into the 
mysteries of the human soul. But has he, 
like them, made the idealized life of another 
century fill again with forms and color and 
motion ? Or has any American romancer ac- 
complished this ? Indeed, in our own day, the 
masterly short story, delineating a single inci- 
dent, character, or even mood, threatens to 
crowd the novel and romance out of existence 
altogether. Yet this at least must surely be 



26o THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

" but the pause of the tide, 
Between the ebb and the flow." 

It is most curious and baffling, indeed, that 
we have thus quite failed, as yet, to do in litera- 
ture just what we above all men are accom- 
plishing in material things. Doubtless, the gift 
of large creative energy will yet be granted to 
our literary artists, as it has been to our makers 
of constitutions and organizers of states, — to 
our business men, — even to our architects and 
engineers. 

In those richer days, our literature will also 
be not less, but more distinctively, American, 
since the epic, the drama, the historical ro- 
mance, must have an adequate environment, a 
local frame as it were, within which its living 
men or women speak and act. Even Homer 
sets his heroes between the fishy Hellespont 
and an Ida shaped in earthly rock, though capt 
with Zeus-sent clouds ; nor can even CEdipus' 
heroic figure, or his words of eternal pathos, 
permit us to forget the nightingales and olives 
of a real Attica, of a beloved Colonus. And 
here the ''Scarlet Letter," "Under the Wil- 
lows," or even "Snowbound" and the "Last 



RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT 261 

Walk" are more than prophetic. Of local 
color American literature will have more, not 
less. 

Meantime, it seems clear that this essentially 
lyrical product of New England is also still 
essentially English. Our Anglo-Saxon men of 
letters give utterance to feelings, convictions, 
visions, at times colored and moulded largely by 
the life in the new home, at times so remote 
from it as " Sir Launf al " or *' King Robert of 
Sicily " ; but in either case perfectly intelligible, 
at least, to those who have remained in the 
older island-abode of their race. Many a vil- 
lage blacksmith of Surrey and Devon, surely, — 
if not of New Zealand or Australia, — drops a 
tear over Longfellow's lines, feeling that every 
word was written for himself. And to pass at 
once to the other extreme of ppesy's many- 
keyed gamut, the most striking occasion on 
which the *' Commemoration Ode " has been 
cited, was when it turned the tide of a debate 
in the British House of Commons. (See 
" Lowell's Letters," Vol. II, p. 306.) 

One exception might be effectively demanded : 
the " Biglow Papers" are almost wholly local. 



2 62 THE NEW ENGLAND POETS 

And they stand, also, at the head of — with 
'* Hudibras," almost alone in — their class. But 
certainly political satire, particularly in dialect, 
is very far from the highest class, even if it 
be granted an unquestioned place within the 
world literature at all. 

Surely it is mere loyalty to our bravest critic 
himself, thus to face the truth. Nay, to him, 
perhaps with a prouder gratitude than to any 
other, we utter his own words : 

" By the embers of loss we count our gains, 

Yoii and yo2irs with the besty 

It is with especial regret, and reluctance too, 
that the student forces himself to see, even in 
the noble, many-sided character of Lowell and 
its utterances in his verse, rather an inspiriting 
prophecy for our literature than the triumph of 
highest accomplishment. But this same keen- 
est of witty critics and sanest of men has him- 
self foreshadowed, both in prose and verse, the 
same judgment. 

^' New occasions teach new duties. Time makes ancient 
good uncouth. 
They must upward still, and onward, who would keep 
abreast of truth." 



RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT 263 

Or if we may draw from the last survivor of 
the little group a hopeful utterance of a kin- 
dred thought, let us remember that great poetry 
is indeed, almost always, the final flower of a 
complete national existence : 

" Be patient ! on the breathing page 
Still pants our hurried past ; 
Pilgrim and soldier, saint and sage, — 
The poet comes the last ! " 



NOTE ON BIBLIOGRAPHY 

The books upon our classical literature are so accessi- 
ble, and so well known, that no exhaustive list is required. 
The most complete view of American letters is aflforded 
by Professor Richardson's history. Mr. Stedman dis- 
cusses the poets only, with the closer sympathy of a 
fellow-craftsman. The Stedman-Hutchinson " Library of 
American Literature " is a rich storehouse of copious 
citations, from Winthrop and Captain John Smith to 
our own day. 

Longfellow's diary has been made the basis of an 
excellent biography by his brother Samuel. LowelPs 
letters have been edited in two stately volumes by Pro- 
fessor Norton, who has added brief biographical outlines. 
This most valuable book (Harper Brothers) should be 
reprinted in much less expensive form, and owned by 
every patriotic student of our literature. The author- 
ized lives of Whittier by Pickard and of Holmes by 
Morse are entirely adequate, include copious citations 
from the correspondence, and may be regarded as final. 
No similar book can be mentioned on Emerson. The vol- 
umes of Mr. Cabot, Edward W. Emerson, O. W. Holmes, 
are all helpful. J. J. Chapman has just presented effec- 
tively a " modern " view of our great idealist. Still 
more is the final book on Hawthorne yet to be written. 
264 



NOTE ON BIBLIOGRAPHY 265 

Meantime we have his own copious journals, the works 
of his son Julian, Mr. and Mrs. Lathrop, and others, and 
the aesthetic critique by Henry James. 

Finally, all students should confess a heavy debt of 
gratitude to one of the most industrious, modest, gener- 
ous, and useful of American bookmen, Horace E. Scud- 
der. To him we owe, chiefly or wholly, the careful edi- 
torial work upon the standard " Riverside " editions of 
our most eminent authors. In the last years the rapid 
appearance of the poets in the single-volume Cambridge 
edition has increased our obligations. Every student should 
prefer this form to the more familiar '' Household," or the 
diminutive " Diamond." Each book contains a brief 
biography, helpful notes, chronological list of poems, etc. 

Most of the works here mentioned are published by 
Houghton, Mifflin & Co., whom we herewith thank for 
cordial permission to cite freely for the needs of this 
Manual. 



A HISTORY 

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EARLY ENGLISH LITERATURE. 

Being the History of English Poetry from its Beginnings 
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A HISTORY 

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Price, $i.oo, net. 



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